I’d like to get that out of the way before I rage on.
Why did Stephen Spielberg decide to do a film on America’s
16th president? The timing is
right, and there was a ready audience for it. Abe Lincoln has been pretty much in the news,
popular on all sides of the political aisle, with President Obama laying claim
to him as his favorite and Bill O’Reilly writing a book on Lincoln, too.
We know Lincoln as the Civil War president, and that event
has legions of followers, enactors, readers.
Besides, can you say “Emancipation Proclamation” without thinking of the
gaunt-faced man who led America through some of its bitterest days?
What I’m saying is that any decent film about Lincoln would
have impressed an audience, and this one is entirely decent. Spielberg knows what the public likes, and
he always makes decent movies, sometimes exceptional ones.
But he’s a liberal
Democrat, and a heavy contributor to the Obama campaign. As such he had a problem. How could he make a film adulating Republicans without
antagonizing Democrats? Southern
Democrats, the political ancestors of the late Democratic Senator Robert Byrd,
were the mainstay of the KKK and the most virulent, vocal, activist, and racist
opponents of emancipation and the 13th Amendment.
Spielberg solved is problem
by focusing on the “conservative” wing of the Republican Party. The movie wastes a lot of digital celluloid in
focusing on the stodgy indignation of the traditional wing of Abe Lincoln’s
Republican confreres and supporters.
That’s not to say that there were no racist Republicans. That would be as idiotic as today’s Democrats
and their sycophantic jockstrap caddies in the liberal media saying that
everyone who voted against Obama, or doesn’t like him or his policies, is a
racist.
Or as stupid as the old regional stereotyping of the North
as being free of racism, while the South is full of bigots. Only demented degenerated people like
Michael Moore say such things.
Yet, for Spielberg to focus his abolitionist cameras on Republican
conservatives instead of on the masses of racist Democrat KKK men, the real
engines of racism, is the type of fakery
and fraud that weakens “Lincoln.”
If Spielberg was that much afraid of offending Democrats, he
shouldn’t have seized upon the money-making opportunity of making a movie about
the president who “freed the slaves.” But then again, we have become accustomed to
that type of hypocrisy from liberal Democrats, from Progressives, and from Obama
administration flaks.
Director Spielberg also spends too much tedious film time on
the congressional intricacies and chicanery that opened the door to the 13th
Amendment. If the workings of Congress
are his true interest, why not make a film of today’s congressional
labyrinths.
Too difficult, I’m sure.
Better to revise history.
Spielberg tries to sublimate his contemporary thematic ideology by
embedding it into the workings of a divided Republican Party in 1865.
Who could fail to be hooked by the subterfuge? We’re supposed to love Lincoln, and we do,
though it’s an often portentous, boring story-for-every-occasion Lincoln with a
high squeaky voice. Wasn’t there even
the hint of a tough streak in the dour man?
At one point, I expected Lincoln to emerge from his bedroom
wearing Birkenstock sandals.
To love Spielberg’s
portrait and depiction of Abraham Lincoln, we must also carry the banner of the
white-centric Progressive-appealing contemporary Democrats who want to blame
Republicans, and Bush, and Tea Parties, and anyone but Obama for the mess we’re
in today.
Another huge weakness of “Lincoln” is that pretends that
African-Americans are passive and obedient beneficiaries of President Lincoln’s
good heart. Hasn’t Spielberg read William
Styron’s “Confessions of Nat Turner?”
Where was Frederick Douglass in this picture?
It is a fact, too, that there were so many Americans, and so
many Europeans (the Brits abolished slavery long before we did), citizens of
both North and South that were completely sick of the savagery and
dehumanization of slavery.
Human slavery must have been as sickening to many whites, as
cruelty to animals is sickening today. It was certainly sickening to John
Brown, “mouldering in the grave” John Brown who hated slavery so much he armed
black men and went to war with the slave masters at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia.
Not even a mention? No, Spielberg’s “Lincoln” ignores so much of
background, of outrage, of rebellion, that it almost seems to ennoble the
status quo, as if the 13th Amendment was some idea contrived by
Progressives to win elections.
