Independence Day

To my American readers I wish us all a wonderful national Independence Day. I just finished an interesting book by Jeffrey Manber and Neil Dahlstrom, "Lincoln's Wrath", Sourcebooks, Inc, 2005, ISBN-13: 978-1-4022-0398-5. For the past seven years I have thought that George Bush's experience and character were a lot like Abraham Lincoln's. Since most people today regard Lincoln as a saint, in the Gandhi or Mandela model, and as a national hero, I was always greeted with rude shock and/or laughter at the comparison to Bush. Lincoln's achievements were not regarded highly at all in his time except by the radical abolitionist minority. He was deeply hated by the northern and southern democrats of his day and by most civil libertarians and haters of big government. It was only much later that his achievement in saving the union and freeing the slaves was recognized for what it was. Lincoln was regarded as a rube and an ignorant tool of his advisers, like Bush.

Lincoln had as much to do with the development of the centralized modern nation state in North America as did the Roosevelt's I and II. And his relations with the press during the Civil War were similar to and even rougher and nastier than those of Bush. If you see a copy of "Lincoln's Wrath", buy it. It's an eye opener to history and how myth-making shapes it.

It's ironic that we will have a person of color, although not African-American in the usual sense, running for president this year as a democrat, since the democrats of south and north in 1861 were all pro-slavery and anti-Lincoln. They feared the competition of the possibly freed slaves for jobs and economic position and resented the Federal Government and Lincoln for forcing the issue on the states. The republicans were thereafter considered the party of progress and freedom until the democrats turned the tables by adopting the socialist rhetoric of victimization while also adopting the republican strong government policies.

The ebb and flow of political movements is crucial to history and economics. Since we are now in an inflationary era which has one or two more decades to run, it's quite probable the democrats will be chosen to lead and to soothe the soreness of the public who now hate the off-shore (Asian/Latin American) economically competitive "slaves" as they hated the southern slaves in the 1860's. It may be a bumpy road, but it's the way we do things, and I wouldn't want to be anywhere else. Enjoy the fireworks.