Bill and I were kind of chuckling via email about the current covers of Newsweek and Time, the former reflecting my fixation with comparing Obama and Lincoln, and the latter picking up on Bill's suggestion that our times may eventually cause a president to consider policies as drastic as some of Franklin Roosevelt's.  (Bill was pointing specifically to "the 1933 Executive Order 6102, which required everyone to sell their gold to the government.")

Bill expressed his surprise at Newsweek's claim that the lines quoted by Obama last week at Grant Park taken from Lincoln's First Inaugural Address ("We are not enemies, but friends. . . . ") weren't Lincoln's but William Seward's.  That didn't ring true, so I reread my history and found that Newsweek had oversimplified things.

The words are Lincoln's, but he was working off of a revision sent to him by Seward, Lioncoln's chief rival for the Republican nomination the year before and his choice for Secretary of State.   Seward's revision: "I close. We are not we must not be aliens or enemies but fellow countrymen and brethren." Lincoln's revision of Seward's revision: "I am loth to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies."

Lincoln had sent his first draft to Seward originally, and Seward worked long and hard to take the bellicosity out of it.   Lincoln accepted Seward's approach wholeheartedly.   Their collaboration on the speech produced one of the finest perorations in history.   Here's Seward's revised ending:

I close. We are not we must not be aliens or enemies but fellow countrymen and brethren. Although passion has strained our bonds of affection too hardly they must not, I am sure they will not be broken. The mystic chords which proceeding form so many battle fields and so many patriot graves pass through all the hearts and all the hearths in this broad continent of ours will yet again harmonize in their ancient music when breathed upon by the guardian angel of the nation.

Here's Lincoln's revision of Seward's revision:

I am loth to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

And that was the beginning of a beautiful relationship, both political and personal, between the two men.   I think it's also a testimony to the power of revision and of collaborative writing.

(I found this information in Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, pages 324 - 326.)

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Posted November 17, 2008.  Link to just this post.

myBO

Your life, little girl, is an empty page
That men will want to write on
-- Rolf to Liesl in The Sound of Music

I remember reading somewhere that Thomas Merton wondered whether he and Fundamentalist Christians served the same God.  I wonder similarly if YourBO is MyBO.  Unless you’re frank, I may not learn how MyBO offends you.

“No prophecy of the scripture is of any private interpretation.”  What's your take on that?

If you break open Obama’s memoir and take a gob of pages in each hand, bearing down somewhat with your thumbs on the open pages as you might to read them, the book applauds. My daughter thought so, too.  Now, mine’s a used paperback; my mother read it at home this past summer in Tidewater where pages can get a little soggy.  Anyway, it’s the loudest book I’ve ever held.  And I think Isaiah’s prophecy that “all the trees of the field will clap their hands” has come to pass in my day, in MyBO.

This week, even the hazard of a cabinet appointment marginalized MyBO.

I am ready to turn the page on the politics of the past.  “I am ready to turn the page on the politics of the past.”

Christians argue most over Genesis and Revelation.  We are half-blind in different eyes, each the other's spitting image.  We see trees as men, walking.  But MyBO sees the past and future rooted in each clattering leaf.

Eventually, the rain stopped, and we found ourselves looking on a barren landscape of gravel and shrub and the occasional baobab tree, its naked, searching branches decorated with the weaver bird’s spherical nests.  I remembered reading somewhere that the baobab could go for years without flowering, surviving on the sparsest of rainfall; and seeing the trees there in the hazy afternoon light, I understood why men believed they possessed a special power – that they housed ancestral spirits and demons, that humankind first appeared under such a tree.  It wasn’t merely the oddness of their shape, their almost prehistoric outline against the stripped-down sky.  “They look as if each one could tell a story,” Auma said, and it was true, each tree seemed to possess a character, a character neither benevolent nor cruel but simply enduring, with secrets whose depths I would never plumb, a wisdom I would never pierce.  They both disturbed and comforted me, those trees that looked as if they might uproot themselves and simply walk away, were it not for the knowledge that on this earth one place is not so different from another – the knowledge that one moment carries within it all that’s gone on before.

That’s from pages 436 and 437 of Dreams from My Father.  Obama was in Kenya then, crying over his father’s grave.  There was no plaque on it, nothing in writing.  When he returned years later with a wife and a Harvard law degree, he found a plaque there.

The GOP wrote Bill Ayers all over Obama’s book.  Turns out it was just their copy.  So they offered Pilate $10,000 to revise it, but they panicked when they read the blank proofs.  TheirBO came out last week as OurGOP and sold millions of copies.  What I have written I have written.

Thomas Merton and the baobab tree.  Neither MyBO nor I can cite sources.

We are dogs, rooting in crotches.  The past is present in a scent, the future’s brazen innocence.  MyBO is me; YourBO is you.

And Liesl’s dreamy echo: “To write on.”  There’s something indiscriminate about an empty page.

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Posted November 15, 2008.  Link to just this post.

obama as moses?  maybe joseph.

Some of Barack Obama’s detractors say that he has a Messiah Complex, and John McCain ran a famous and effective ad this summer juxtaposing footage of Obama before crowds with a clip of Charlton Heston as Moses, parting the Red Sea in the movie The Ten Commandments.

McCain, of course, doesn’t really think of Obama as a modern-day Moses or Jesus, but I like to think that McCain doesn’t dismiss the idea of comparing current leaders with past, archetypal ones.  Such comparisons can be both helpful and simplistic, which is the best any framework can aspire to.

I’ve already written about how an Obama presidency may play out like Lincoln’s.  Lincoln was a constitutional thinker, a slow decision-maker, and, for most of his first term, and unpopular president.  But McCain’s ad got me thinking even bigger.

I can’t help thinking like this.  While the solid-black “Is God Dead?” cover seems to be my generation’s most memorable Time Magazine cover from the 1960’s, mine has always been the 1967 “Man of the Year” cover presenting “L.B.J. as Lear,” surrounded by his three Democratic “daughters” – Robert Kennedy, Wilbur Mills, and Hubert Humphrey.  (Humphrey was the halo-topped Cordelia in David Levine’s cover caricature.  How prescient of Time, considering Johnson’s shabby treatment of Humphrey during the latter’s presidential campaign the following year.)

I was ten years old.  My father read Time from cover to cover every week while I was growing up, and he still does to this day.  I have a vague memory of one of my parents explaining to me in January of 1968 who King Lear was.  My first exposure to Shakespeare, then, was in a political context in which a legendary figure was used to shed light on modern-day politics.  I think Shakespeare would have liked that.  I still like his history plays the best, maybe because of the implicit comparisons any work of history makes to the present. *  I discovered by reading old history books that even “objective” history is colored by the historian’s milieu.  So where does our influence on history stop and its influence on us begin?  They overlap.  Good history is attainable, but comparisons are as inescapable as subjectivity.

So there’s Lincoln.  But McCain’s ad got me thinking of biblical antecedents.  The Republicans’ facetious suggestion that Obama shares similarities with Jesus and Moses, who were visionaries, doesn’t seem apt to me.  Obama seems less of a visionary than a preserver, someone perhaps born with just enough foresight and organizational skills to help pull an existing nation through a crisis.  Joseph seems about right.

Joseph was Jacob’s favorite son whose jealous, older brothers sold him into slavery when he was seventeen.  He then served a top Egyptian government official before landing in the prison run by that official because of a misunderstanding involving the official’s wife.  While in prison, Joseph demonstrated a talent for interpreting dreams.  This talent earned him an audition with Pharaoh.  Joseph interpreted Pharaoh’s dreams as foretelling seven years of plenty followed by seven years of famine, and he suggested that Pharaoh appoint someone to oversee the collection of lots of food during the first seven years.   Pharaoh agreed and put Joseph in charge of Egypt.  In so doing, did Pharaoh mistake a prophetic gift for leadership?

Joseph seemed to be a rare mix of community organizer and farsighted statesman (okay, you see where I’m going with this) that Egypt needed to run things leading up to and during its crisis.  Before Pharaoh hired him, Joseph had organized the people around him in Potiphar’s house and prison and had ended up running both places. After a few years of seeing Joseph in prison, “the keeper of the prison committed to Joseph’s hand all the prisoners that were in the prison; and whatsoever they did there, he was the doer of it”  (Gen. 39:22, KJV).

Pharaoh wasn’t as concerned about Joseph’s thin resume as he was with the skill set he saw in Joseph, and, if the American people hire Obama Tuesday, it may be for the same reason.  Consider what we might already know about Obama:

Inspiring and organizing people.  I don’t find Obama’s rhetoric to be as uplifting as, say, Lincoln’s, but it is inspirational, if one measures inspiration by how much it inspires people to act.   Doesn't inspiration imply action?

Obama speaks to get people to act.  Even when he was forced to give a speech in Philadelphia to protect himself from the effects of Rev. Wright, it turned out to be a persuasive call for a national dialogue on race.  (I admit that there was almost no follow-through on that one.)  Obama has attracted people with his rhetoric, but he has also helped those people find their place in the most impressive presidential campaign in U.S. history.  His campaign is both personal and technological with a modern corporation’s care for extending and protecting its brand – a perfect fit for the candidate and the times.  It is well organized, but it allows for a lot of flexibility on the local level and feels like the grassroots movement he claims it to be.  The number of donations, donors and volunteers to his campaign has broken records, as we all know.

Joseph sold Pharaoh and an entire nation on his plan and mobilized the nation to follow thorough on it.  If we face a crisis, Obama may need to mobilize and organize Americans in a similar fashion, and he seems to have better skills than any recent national politician to do it.

Valuing pragmatism over ideology.  I bet that one of Obama’s biggest problems, if elected, would be the Democratic Congress.  I think he would prove in the long run to be one of the least ideological presidents we’ve had, even though his Congressional voting record would suggest otherwise.  Obama was preaching post-partisanship when post-partisanship wasn’t cool, back a year ago when the other Democratic candidates were trying to inspire primary voters with a vision of Democratic Party ascendancy.  I remember one Washington Post article in particular that questioned whether Obama’s bipartisan message during much of 2007 could possibly win the nomination of an angry, eager Democratic Party (Washington Post, "Does Obama's Message Match the Moment?" 17 Oct. 2007).

Joseph the Redistributor eventually took everyone’s personalty and land in exchange for food during the seven-year famine.   In fact, Joseph, once a slave himself, made Egypt a nation of slaves by the end of his fourteen-year plan.  But the people accepted it: slavery must have seemed better than the alternative, which was extinction.   Hopefully, we won’t become slaves, but our next two or three presidents may have to call on us to make sacrifices in the name of national survival.  Our president cannot be a slave to ideology and expect to succeed in such an environment.

Sticking with the plan.  Joseph must have gotten a good deal of heat for sticking with his plan no matter how silly it seemed to do so during the plentiful years.  Obama and his advisors have stuck to their overall campaign strategy, showing very little worry or shifting, for instance, when his poll numbers didn’t rise as quickly as he had expected against Hillary Clinton late last year.  When McCain picked Palin and then later “suspended” his campaign to save the nation from its financial crisis, Obama again stuck with his plan, never criticizing McCain’s choices (until implicitly criticizing his choice of Palin this past week).  Obama has shown that he can stick with a plan even though the payoff isn’t evident to most.

Seeing around the corner.  Joseph’s foresight was vindicated in the end, and some of Obama’s foresight has been vindicated, too, even before Tuesday’s election.  Obama was criticized for stances he took with regard to Pakistan, Iraq, and Iran, but in each case the Bush Administration found itself forced to follow his lead.  With regard to Pakistan, Obama suggested that we not ignore any evidence of bin Laden’s and Al Qaeda’s whereabouts but that we attack them, unilaterally if necessary.  He got a lot of heat for that position, but four months later President Bush did just as he suggested: he attacked Al Qaeda positions inside Pakistan, and he did so with moderate success.  The second instance is Iran, where Obama has advocated direct engagement at lower diplomatic levels and not at the presidential level unless and until progress is made.  Senator McCain doesn't seem to understand this distinction, and he ridiculed what once was an unquestioned tenet of our foreign policy under presidents like Roosevelt and Truman and Kennedy.  Later we learned that President Bush had again adjusted his foreign policy to follow Obama’s lead.  He dispatched officials who are negotiating directly with Iran.  With regard to Iraq, Obama advocated a sixteen-month withdrawal timetable, was criticized for it, and then had his approach, if not the specific number of months, affirmed in essence by the presidents of both Iraq and the United States.  (I adapted this paragraph from my earlier post, “My Closing Argument.”)

If I’m right, we may not be living in a moment that calls for a messianic political figure.  If things get bad, though, we may need a preserver – someone who can inspire us to take collective action and to make collective sacrifices.  We’ll need someone like Joseph, separated at a young age from his father and his father’s family and who must not have looked like all of the other Pharaohs on those Egyptian dollar bills.

* Our King Lear is a history and a tragedy, a conflation of two Shakespeare plays, The True Chronicle of the History of the Life and Death of King Lear and His Three Daughters and The Tragedy of King Lear.

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Posted November 2, 2008.  Link to just this post.

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