UPDATED: Spielberg’s ‘Pleasant Fiction’ About Abe

Film, Founding Fathers, History, Hollywood, Propaganda, Racism

Tom DiLorenzo says that “Spielberg’s Lincoln movie is just another left-wing Hollywood fantasy.” Lincoln didn’t use his political heft to push for the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment. He did, however, push for an earlier iteration, the “Corwin Amendment.” It “would have prohibited the federal government from ever interfering with Southern slavery”:

Steven Spielberg’s new movie, Lincoln, is said to be based on several chapters of the book Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns-Goodwin, who was a consultant to Spielberg. The main theme of the movie is how clever, manipulative, conniving, scheming, lying, and underhanded Lincoln supposedly was in using his “political skills” to get the Thirteenth Amendment that legally ended slavery through the U.S. House of Representatives in the last months of his life. This entire story is what Lerone Bennett, Jr. the longtime executive editor of Ebony magazine and author of Forced into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream, calls a “pleasant fiction.” It never happened.
It never happened according to the foremost authority on Lincoln among mainstream Lincoln scholars, Harvard University Professor David H. Donald, the recipient of several Pulitzer prizes for his historical writings, including a biography of Lincoln.

MORE.

UPDATE (Nov. 30): Writes Myron Pauli:

“I would like to correct one thing. The Congress that passed the Corwin 13th Amendment was not overwhelmingly Republican. There was a small House Republican majority but the (lame duck) Senate was Democratic (and only barely Republican if you count 14 Senators walking out) and a 2/3 majority is needed for an Amendment.

http://lewrockwell.com/dilorenzo/dilorenzo245.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Senate_elections,_1858

Nevertheless, Lincoln did almost nothing (and impeded efforts) to stop the impending Civil War during the nearly 10 months from his election to the Battle of First Manassas. A professor of history from LSU (whose name I regrettably forgot) went over all the proposed compromises and Lincoln’s opposition/inaction to preventing war.

Ironically, the Crittenden and Peace Conference Plan compromises would have confined the extension of slavery into Arizona and New Mexico – regions so barren that they did not become states for another 40 years – and not conducive to plantation slavery whatsoever! To keep slavery out of Arizona (!!), over 600,000 people died, a region got impoverished, with more wounded and PTSD and
drug addicted, the income tax imposed, etc.

http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/peace.asp

Lincoln, of course, blamed the War on the South (or God – 2nd inaugural).”

The Fiscal Cliff: A Lemming’s Lunacy

Debt, Economy, Morality, Natural Law, Propaganda, Taxation

Here’s an excerpt from “The Fiscal Cliff: A Lemming’s Lunacy,” the current WND column. Receive the weekly column in your email. Scroll down the page to sign-up for it.

“Since the chicken-little metaphor is hackneyed, let us use the alleged lunacy of the lemming as a metaphor for the prattle that rises from the cattle that is America’s intelligentsia, in general, and on the fiscal cliff, in particular. ‘Alleged lunacy’ because the idea that the adorable fury critter plunges periodically to its death, en masse, is a figment of another intellectual powerhouse: the think tank known as the Walt Disney Company.

From the late-night talk show hosts and their guests to the daytime cable news comedians and their hangers-on: All are discussing the country’s impending and ‘horrifying’ collective tumble down the thing called the ‘fiscal cliff.’

As the fiscal-cliff chant goes, the country is headed for an economic precipice due to a bundle of laws that will take effect at the bewitching hour of midnight, Dec. 31, 2012. Only a compromise between our factioned overlords in D.C., who enacted the law in the first place, will avert mass suicide.

Let us unpack this linguistic construct.

At least some of the noisy nomenclature refers to a package of spending cuts, ‘deep, automatic cuts,’ by Barron’s telling, bundled in the Budget Control Act of 2011.

‘The federal budget deficit will be immediately cut in half, shrinking to approximately $641 billion in 2013 from the approximately $1.1 trillion in 2012,’ estimates financier Peter Schiff. I’m inclined to think of this ‘budget sequestration’ Wikipedia describes as ‘broad and shallow’ as nothing more than cuts to designated increases in spending.

However you slice it, why, pray tell, is this a bad thing?” …

Read “The Fiscal Cliff: A Lemming’s Lunacy” on WND. Receive the weekly column in your email. Scroll down to sign-up for it.

If you’d like to feature this column, WND’s longest-standing, exclusive paleolibertarian column, in or on your publication (paper or pixels), contact ilana@ilanamercer.com.

JOIN THE DISCUSSION, AND DO BATTLE FOR LIBERTY BY:

• Using the content-sharing icons on Barely a Blog posts.

• At the WND and RT Comments Sections, and on Facebook.

• By clicking to “Like,” “Tweet” and “Share” WND’s “Return To Reason” , and RT’s “Paleolibertarian Column.”

Death-Spiral States

Debt, Economy, Government, Political Economy, Private Property, Socialism, Taxation, The State

A death spiral state is one in which the parasites outnumber the hosts. In these states, the taker-(public sector workers)-to-maker (private sector workers) ratio is unsustainable.

William Baldwin of Forbes magazine defines a death-spiral state as one that has “more takers than makers,” where “a taker is someone who draws money from the government, as an employee, pensioner or welfare recipient. A maker is someone gainfully employed in the private sector.”

Charitably, Forbes counts only “11 death spiral states, rang[ing] from New Mexico, with 1.53 takers for every maker, down to Ohio, with a 1-to-1 ratio.”

Consider (or don’t):

Let’s say you are a software entrepreneur with 100 on your payroll. If you stay in San Francisco, your crew will support 139 takers. In Texas, they would support only 82. Austin looks very attractive.

Tom Wolfe’s Big, Bad Book

America, Celebrity, English, Intelligence, Literature, Sex

Leave a reply

A careful guardian of the English language Tom Wolfe is not. The infelicities of style and substance in the novelist’s latest book are summed up by Stephen Abell, in the Times Literary Supplement’s November 9, 2012 issue. Abell’s verdict about the door-stopper, Back to Blood: “While it is big, it is not particularly clever”:

…as we struggle through his fourth blockbuster, Back to Blood, we begin to reflect that size, in literature as in life, is not everything. We can at least confidently point to some of the products of Wolfe’s recent cramming …

… [Wolfe] direct[‘s] much of our attention beneath the sheets. Not that sex in Back to Blood goes on merely in the bedroom. In one ill-conceived set-piece, Norman and Magdalena attend a regatta, which becomes a floating orgy with pornography being displayed on the giant sails of some of the boats (complete with rather startling “labia majorae three times as big as the entrance to the Miami Convention Center”).

Sex unquestionably brings out some of the flaws in Wolfe’s prose. For example, its effortfully mimetic approach, where the writing enacts the sounds it is describing. This is from a superfluous trip to the “Honey Pot” (an unimaginative strip club), where Wolfe wants to leave us in no doubt about the pole-straddling gyrations of the woman on stage: “BEAT thung CROTCH thung TAIL thung CRACK thung PERI thung NEUM thung”. Or its obsession with transcribing sounds to needless effect (which creates sentences that make it look as if the author has fallen asleep against his keyboard): “unhh, ahhh ahhh, ooom-muh, ennngh ohhhhunh”. There is crass imagery (“his big generative jockey was inside her pelvic saddle”) and glib alliteration (“lascivious looks of men lifting the lust in the loins”). And there is the relentlessly anatomical categorization: “pectoral glories”, “mons pubis”, “their montes veneris”.

…The corollary is, needless to say, a simplistic attitude towards men, and manliness. Men in Back to Blood are judged by the quality of “not being a pussy”, and by their muscularity (an area where Wolfe has an almost fetishistic eye): …

… The notion of an anatomical approach is also crucial to understanding Wolfe’s writing style more generally. He is a founding father of what might called “List lit”, in which constituent aspects of life are broken down into a catalogue of parts. So, for example, when a character sits before a desk, we are immediately presented “with its Art Deco kidney shape, its gallery, its sharkskin writing surface, the delicately tapered shin guards on its legs, its ivory dentils running about the entire rim, its vertical strings of ivory running through the macassar ebony”.

At the basic level of sentence structure, this often means that Wolfe’s descriptions (and the descriptions are unquestionably his; they do not vary with the characters on whose perceptions they are apparently based) are filled with minor variation, as if he wishes to create an effect of mass multiplication simply by using near-synonyms: “they looked prissy, dinky, finicky, fussy, and gussied up”; “he could insult people to their faces, humiliate them, break their spirits . . . make them cry, sob, blubber, boohoo”.

The result is a novel which is bright and busy, and full of information rather than imagination.

MORE.