Lincoln’s Second Inaugural, “With malice toward none, with charity for all...”, is getting a lot of play these days. As should his First: “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies;" "The better angels of our angel."
I have thought much about them too. Should they be the tone for Biden with Trump’s supporters? I have wavered and vacillated. But then I remembered: Lincoln did direct a war that killed 618,000, 360,000 Northern soldiers, including Sgt. Nathan Bracken. And it wasn’t until Lincoln embraced Total War and loosed Sherman that he made the South welp.
The brutality of the Lincoln Project’s ads do not appeal to our better angels but they express the soul of the state-of-nature proto-American. The country that Tocqueville and Dickens saw was a violent, brutal country. We have always been thus. Like a bumper sticker I once saw, “Hate is TOO a Family virtue.” The Lincoln Project and yesterday's article by Timothy Egan made me see that. "Civility and nuance" are the result of civilizing of the proto-American. It is an incomplete project. "Nice ain't gonna cut it" in this era of Trump as it did not in the Civil War era.
And so let us sic the 20th Maine on Alabama again; let us strip the Shenandoah Valley bare again; let us loose Blue Shirt Joe Biden to burn his way through Georgia again; let us resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that South Carolina must be destroyed again, and that Trumpism shall perish from the earth.
I have thought much about them too. Should they be the tone for Biden with Trump’s supporters? I have wavered and vacillated. But then I remembered: Lincoln did direct a war that killed 618,000, 360,000 Northern soldiers, including Sgt. Nathan Bracken. And it wasn’t until Lincoln embraced Total War and loosed Sherman that he made the South welp.
The brutality of the Lincoln Project’s ads do not appeal to our better angels but they express the soul of the state-of-nature proto-American. The country that Tocqueville and Dickens saw was a violent, brutal country. We have always been thus. Like a bumper sticker I once saw, “Hate is TOO a Family virtue.” The Lincoln Project and yesterday's article by Timothy Egan made me see that. "Civility and nuance" are the result of civilizing of the proto-American. It is an incomplete project. "Nice ain't gonna cut it" in this era of Trump as it did not in the Civil War era.
And so let us sic the 20th Maine on Alabama again; let us strip the Shenandoah Valley bare again; let us loose Blue Shirt Joe Biden to burn his way through Georgia again; let us resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that South Carolina must be destroyed again, and that Trumpism shall perish from the earth.
