While away this past weekend, Your Humble Blogger went to the Lincoln Memorial. It’s an impressive thing, made only somewhat obnoxious by the strange idea that people had a hundred years ago that to make a thing impressive, you should make people climb up a bunch of stairs to get to it. Still, once up the steps, the immense statue of seated Lincoln is humbling (in a good way), and then, after a breath or two, you can turn your attention to the walls.
Oddly enough, despite the big statue, the memorial is (to my eyes) more to Lincoln’s words than to his deeds, and that is magnificently appropriate. I read off the wall the Gettysburg Address to my Perfect Non-Reader. I have read it many times, aloud and silently, but this was the first time to such a blank audience. I don’t know if she understood any of it; I rather hope she didn’t. I choked myself up, as usual. I somehow never memorized it. I suppose my generation never saw memorizing the Gettysburg Address as a civil rights issue. Anyway, it’s a great, great speech, tremendously influential as well as surprisingly current. After all, one of the major issues—perhaps the major issue—of the current campaign is how to (and whether to) “take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion”, and what exactly that cause was.
And then there’s the other wall. The speech at the second inauguration is, in the arrogant opinion of YHB, simply the best speech ever given by an American politician or statesman. I’m inclined to insert the thing in full, because it’s that important. I’ll restrain myself, though, and simply plead with you-all to follow the link and read the thing. Read it aloud. Seriously, even if you are in the office. Pretend that you are testing the voice-recognition software. It works better aloud, not just because of the balance of the sentences (“Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other.”) but to get the taste of it in your mouth, to use your breath to make the words happen. It’s harder to avoid thinking about the words when you say them aloud, I think.
Yes, that war was, in the common phrase, civil, in that the citizens of the Confederacy were citizens of the United States, and would be so after the war was over. There were peculiar and specific concerns that make statements such as “Both parties deprecated war, but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish, and the war came” powerful and not obviously generally applicable. But in large, President Lincoln is talking about war, the causes of it and the results of it, and the simple nature of it, and he is still right. And, of course, he is right in a way that was sorely needed, and not fully heeded. And he was right in a way that is still sorely needed, and not heeded at all.
“The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes.” Could Our Only President or for that matter any recent president or nominee have said those words in that simple way? And, it being two weeks until our quadrennial choosing, let me pose this: Which, of John Kerry or Our Only President, can you imagine saying this at his inaugural, saying it sincerely and with awareness of what it means:
With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.
,
-Vardibidian.