Spielberg's "Lincoln," Justice, and other topics....

Once more:  Civil  Wars are not good, and should not be glorified or perpetuated...

Most people simply don't understand (or perhaps misunderstand) Justice.  What  is justice?  Many seem to think it is fine as long as it can be used against others.  It never applies to one's own actions or policies.  

That's clearly what most people - especially our current President and most of Congress, the Judiciary, etc - believe, today.  In other words, they do NOT believe in "the Golden Rule", Categorical Imperative, or other principles of universality and identity - "What's good for the goose is good for the gander," to quote a famous feminist whose name has been lost to history.

I was watching the recent  Spielberg version of the final months of Lincoln's life and work.  I suppose it is all as historically accurate as could be reconstructed from journals, letters, etc.  Do we really know people before the days of sound and visual recordings?  Of course, there were crude photographs, carefully posed and created at considerable expense,  but before that, there were always artists to record history (and mythology).  

One of the most controversial parts of Daniel Day Lewis's portrayal was the high-pitched conversational voice - nothing like the voice of a tyrant or other strong leader.  Maybe it was Lincoln who TR was thinking of when he said, "Speak softly, and carry a big stick."  In any case, it was thought to be historically accurate, and fits the psycho-analytic account of Lincoln as a kind of anally-retentive adolescent, or what we would now call "an Old Boy". 

Of course, they were all cigar-smoking, whiskey-swigging barbarians by today's standards, but  in Montana, they'd fit right in - even now.  Lincoln had but a few years of any kind of formal education, yet read widely (or at least deeply) on his own - not by today's standards, but when you only have a few books, you read and re-read them carefully, even adopting that style of thinking and writing.  The King James Bible and Shakespeare are all one really needs to re-create the mind of Abraham Lincoln (in a literary sense, anyway).  Being some sort of backwoodsman or frontiersman accounts for the rest of what he was, which included Indian fighting.  I'm not sure he was as personally friendly with Black soldiers as is shown in the film, either.  But the prevailing attitudes of the time were much more racist, on average, than they are, today - although maybe not 50 years ago.  

I bought a DVD of "Lincoln" at my local pawnshop (for $2) shortly after it was released - some good soul having quickly recycled his or her retail purchase.  I had also read several reviews and essays on the film (and saved a lot more).  So, I wasn't suprised, but found it difficult to watch, so put it aside until last week, when I watched it carefully in several installments.

Lincoln was the most important president in the Stephens family tradition (having long before divorced ourselves from the memory of "Little Aleck" Stephens, who is well-portrayed in this film).  Yet, the women, at least (many of whom were trained as teachers) tended not to like him so much, and there are several books from my grandmother's library which are clearly anti-Lincoln (as most of the press and East Coast society were - a point brought out very clearly in the film).  

In his own lifetime, Lincoln was widely hated, not only by Southerners and other elitists, but by his own party, the military, and, it's safe to say, nearly all common soldiers.  Only a small percentage thought they were fighting to free the slaves, for example, and Lincoln was certainly a compromiser on that, caving into the "Radical Republicans" who held the government hostage, much as the Neo-Cons do, today (while it is all blamed on the "libertarian" TEA's, who are identified as today's "Secessionists").  

If  it was meant to be a parable for Pres. Obama, it is well-done - even down to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra performing in the soundtrack.  I hope he watched it two or three times with some learned advisors - he could have learned a lot from it, and perhaps he has.

In the film, Lincoln asks an engineer if he studied Euclid, the answer being that he'd studied it in school, but remembers little of it now.  Lincoln quotes something - basically, the Law of Identity - one of the Postulates or Theorems (which he called "common notions") which says that if a=b, and b=c, then a=c.  It's also a basic rule of Aristotelian logic, which was supposed to "superceded" by Frege and Russell-Whitehead, among others.  The Logical Positivists, Vienna Circle (Verein Ernst Mach), and even the General Semantics movement continued this crusade against Aristotle and the "tyranny" of his logic and naivete of his science.  

In fact, such criticisms are nonsense, as those who studied the history of ideas pointed out - especially Popper.  The fine points of logic and epistemology have nothing to do with the larger revolt against reason and science, which is destroying our world before our very eyes.  And part of it is the idea that knowledge is bound by a priori rules, which are somehow to be "enforced" by academia, and the police powers of the State.  

And so, Justice depends on Reason, but not in an authoritarian, deterministic sense.  It depends on critical or "evolutionary"  Rationalism, which includes everything, and does not categorically reject certain things because they are "immoral" or even "contrary to the public interest."  Knowledge, as well as Justice, is an open-ended game.  

The only real good is a good Will - the desire to help and respect others, rather than oppressing, attacking, or destroying them.  And that is the great sin of our times - to treat people equally (badly), rather than according to what they are and what they have done, or what they can become with better treatment.  Criminals are made, not born, as are every kind of sociopath, which used to be the very definition of "criminal."  Whoever tries to exploit or enslave others is the criminal, not the persons who are so exploited and enslaved.  

Lincoln probably understood this.  But most of today's political power brokers clearly do not.  As I've often said, we don't have political parties, anymore.  We have corporate crime syndicates.  And until we get rid of them or remove them from their controlling positions over every branch of government, we are more or less doomed - to poverty and slavery, if not nuclear or environmental catastrophe.  

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I'm still amazed at the residual racism in Montana, even in those a generation younger than my own -  and it's directed not only at Native Americans, but Asians, Blacks, Hispanics, and now more often, Muslims.   Montana has good trade and investment relations with Korea, Japan, and the several China's - Hong Kong, especially.  And with Southeast Asia - Thailand, Indonesia, etc.  They all buy our grain and want to buy our coal.  But most of the  Blacks and Asians here, came with the military, although large numbers of Chinese came as laborers in the railroad and mining camps, and as soon as one job was done, and they had accumulated a little capital, they went into business - laundries, restaurants, gardening, etc., just like California.  

At the same time, the Black regiments from the Civil War - called "buffalo soldiers" by the Indians because of their skin color and bushy hair - were stationed here, along with many freed slaves who became cowboys and businesswomen in various frontier town pursuits.  WWII brought in a new generation of Black soldiers, and I'm told by some of their descendants that Malmstrom was actually designated as suitable for mixed-race couples who would have fared badly in the South back in the 1940's and '50's.  Still, there were only a handful of black students out of some 2000 enrolled at Great Falls High School which I attended from 1962-65.  And aside from a few Metis with French names, there were virtually no Native American high school graduates in those days.  I used to take one in the cab who graduated in 1969, and he claimed to be the first one, ever.  

A slight exaggeration, but not much.  How ironic  that the GF made of whitewashed  rocks on Hill 57 also  marked the home of the Indian shanty-town where people lived in the most abject poverty.  (Hill 57 was so named because it had an improvised sign for Heinz products, "57 varieties" also formed of whitewashed rocks.   Nobody said we weren't a steakhouse town!).  

I spent my really formative years (birth-6 years old, and on through high school, although we lived "in town" during the school year) on a mid-sized wheat and cattle ranch - one of the oldest in that community - Upper Highwood - still in the hands of the original homesteaders' descendants.  My grandfather Stephens was revered - by everyone, it would seem, but his own sons, who more or less did the opposite of what he would have counseled, and drank themselves to death in the process.  My father did understand it intellectually, though.  He was a very learned and refined man, without most of the vulgar bullying and other vices common to the peasantry who surrounded him in his early years (many of whom are quite accomplished and distinguished, now). 

He was also a man of peace.  His father, my great-grandfather, actually voted for Lincoln in 1864 - the first vote he ever cast for  President.  So, we were real "Lincoln Republicans", and from the same general location, Kentucky and Illinois at the same time Lincoln flourished.  Some of my ancestors fought in the Blackhawk Wars, too - perhaps even as Lincoln's commander, since one was a Colonel Yocom, who was my great-grandmother's father.  I even have a Bible in my possession which she gave to my uncle Charles when he was a small boy.