Post 166 - August 24, 2020

Day 166…

I am sitting out in front of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library in Springfield, Illinois. I’ve never been to this city before which I find somewhat surprising.

The day before yesterday, I left Jamestown, North Dakota and drove south. I made my way through a long stretch of North Dakota, all down through South Dakota and then spent the night in Sioux City, Iowa. Yesterday, I continued south into Missouri (Miz-ur-ah) and then started heading east into Illinois where I am now. It was a lot of driving with not a lot of distractions.

Eastern North and South Dakota, and Iowa for that matter, is mostly flat farmland. Between Chicago and Fargo there was actually quite a lot of traffic. I’m not sure where everyone was going, but many of them were on their way. Outside of Fargo and all the way down here, the traffic was much more like what I experienced back east near home. Sparse.

Jamestown to Sioux City was basically three straight lines of road. It seemed pretty endless. I don’t tend to listen to anything while I am driving, preferring the silence and my own thoughts, but going through all that farmland needed a backdrop so I turned on the radio.

Sports and Jesus, in that order, take up most of the bandwidth and I’m not interested in listening to talk about either. I have been listening to all the songs on oldies rock stations for fifty years, so I am not all that interested in that either. It all sounds like the soundtrack to the musical Rock of Ages to me. Or an audition for Jersey Boys. On an endless loop.

I have to admit that what I like listening to when I am driving through open rural areas is Country. There’s nothing better than a little Tim McGraw going through an eternity of dry farmland for as far as the eye can see. I skip around radio stations looking for songs that I like.

Then, there’s the talk.

As we all know, the President’s niece, Mary Trump, wrote a tell-all book about her Uncle called, “Too Much and Never Enough: How my Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man”. Well, tapes she made talking to the President’s sister, Maryanne Trump Barry, were just released or got leaked. Mary had not provided provenance for some of the claims she made in the book, but the recordings answered the question about where some of the information came from.

"He has no principles. None. None. And his base, I mean my God, if you were a religious person, you want to help people. Not do this," and "It's the phoniness of it all. It's the phoniness and this cruelty. Donald is cruel." And "His goddamned tweet and lying, oh my God… The change of stories. The lack of preparation. The lying. Holy sh*t."

His sister was speaking candidly not knowing she was being recorded. It also turns out that she was the source for the information that the President or someone in his family hired somebody to take the SATs (originally called the Scholastic Aptitude Test) for him.

The President’s response was, “Every day it’s something else, who cares?”

“Every day it’s something else, who cares?”

It’s true. Every single day, the President either does something or something is uncovered about what he has done in the past or he announces what unthought-out and dangerous thing he is planning on doing in the future.

Every single day.

And we’re more or less numb to it.

Finding out that you paid someone to take the SATs for you, in the past would have been enough to derail an entire career. With this President, it was just what happened yesterday, and we are already on to other things twenty-four hours later.

On the radio in the car, I listed to conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh for a while. He was talking about the issues that New York City is facing in terms of its economy. In particular, he recounted a conversation that he had with the owner of a famous NYC restaurant called Patsy’s. He was speaking, quite rightly, about how hard it is for New York’s eateries to keep afloat without Broadway. He was actually right on the money about a lot of what he was saying. And then the tone of his voice changed.

He started blaming Democrats for the situation. Gone was the reasonable and thoughtful tone, and in its place was an amped-up hard-sell political diatribe. He wasn’t yelling, but everything he said was heightened. And he stopped being accurate.

He started conflating facts or outright misrepresenting them. He was on a roll and he was leaving no time for the listener to think. Limbaugh piled on half-truths, false equivalencies and falsehoods in a passionate and righteous way that left no room for doubt whatsoever.

As I scanned through the radio dial, the second I heard that same tone in local radio hosts, I knew that they would be lying soon, and I was always right.

Then I’d land on NPR and the tone of the discussions, even among people who disagreed with each other was measured and intelligent. There was none of that salesman-like energy in how they were speaking.

“Every day it’s something else, who cares?”

Yesterday, in Walt Disney’s hometown of Marceline, Missouri, I saw the first Biden placard on somebody’s lawn that I’ve seen this entire trip. I will say that I was expecting to see far more Republican advertising on this trip than I have, but up until yesterday, the ones I saw were ALL Republican.

Our Country’s divide does not so seem to be geographical. It seems to be far more along rural/urban lines. The big cities leaning left and the great open spaces leaning right.

Now that’s not really news to anyone. That’s why we have the Electoral College. It was established by Constitutional amendment in 1787 to allow states with smaller populations to have equal voting power as states with larger populations. Wyoming with the lowest population in the country, therefore, doesn’t get completely marginalized by California which has the largest.

The way the delegates cast their ballots differs widely from state to state. The GOP has spent decades attempting to gerrymander districts to their advantage.

When Abraham Lincoln ran for President in 1860, there were four candidates that year. He ran for the Republicans against John C. Breckinridge who represented the Southern Democratic party, John Bell from the Constitutional Union party and Stephen Douglas who represented the Democratic party.

The country was widely splintered. Lincoln won only 40% of the popular vote. He wasn’t even on the ballot in 10 southern states. We think we are a divided nation now, well we literally split in half after this election, with the Southern states actually seceding from the Union.

Going through the Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum this morning was very moving in a way that I wasn’t expecting.

Up until the point that he was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth in Ford’s Theatre, nobody much liked Lincoln. The cartoons of the day of him were merciless. His stance on the institution of slavery made him widely unpopular all over the country - not just in the South.

There were four slave-owning states that did not secede - Kentucky, Missouri, Maryland and Delaware. Some of their governments split, but they stayed with the North.

Strict abolitionists thought that the Emancipation Proclamation was a pointless exercise. It only applied to the southern states that had left the union and were therefore, in theory, out of Lincoln’s control. It did not apply to the four states that remained in the Union because Lincoln wanted them to stay allies. It also did not apply to the unincorporated territories out west.

Abraham Lincoln was a politician. He knew he couldn’t afford to let those four states leave. He was moving forward in steps and nobody was happy about any of it. Too fast. Too slow. Too strong. Too weak.

“Every day it’s something else, who cares?”

Abraham Lincoln kept the course. He pushed forward when even his own Cabinet tried to get him to hold off. In his Cabinet were his three rivals for the Republican nomination - William H. Seward (Secretary of State), Salmon P. Chase (Secretary of the Treasury) and Edward Bates (Attorney General).

Lincoln united his party and then united a deeply divided United States.

Then he was killed, and people were deeply shocked. Their perceptions of him changed.

Springfield, Illinois is a perfect place to visit at this time in our history. It is a perfect reminder of what this country can be and what we can achieve.

If our current President can win the upcoming election through lies and deceit, then what does that say about who we are as a Nation?

 When our current President suggested that he be added to the Mount Rushmore monument, we laughed. Well, we need to stop laughing and start fighting to ensure that that never happens. Lincoln has a rightful place on that rocky hillside, the man that sits in the White House today does not.

“Every day it’s something else, who cares?”

I am going to spend the next few hours looking at the places Abraham Lincoln lived in and worked in during his time here in Springfield. His legacy is a gift to all of us.

I am then going to pay my respects at his tomb where he lies buried.

For a great man and a great American.

My deepest respects