Hysterical Historical

With astigmatic hindsight I nominate Abraham Lincoln as our worst president. Not for cozying up to railroad interests nor for authorizing the hanging of renegade Native Americans. Lincoln made a grave error we are now living with, more than ever before. He should have let the southern states go. Slavery would have fallen from its own weight for economic reasons even if its moral abomination couldn’t penetrate the unconscionable heart and soul of slaveholders.

Subjugation of Blacks has continued in spite of the Union victory and three constitutional amendments. Racism has hardly been confronted. What reconstruction briefly happened has long since been reversed. We are a country in disgrace with a sin-sick soul.

162 years later it is clear that Lincoln should have let them secede. The Confederacy would have been a third world country mired in poverty and crippled by brainlessness. The only contribution we would have missed is jazz but those sounds would probably have made their way up the Mississippi anyway.

If at first you don’t secede try, try again. As for the western states and other territories where guns and gospel prevail, thank you for the apple pie, now please leave.

The 600,000 dead did not deliver a new birth of freedom. They bequeathed us a century of lynching, disenfranchisement, police brutality and daily indignities. It has resulted in a house divided which teeters like never before. We are not or ever have been a nation of, for and by the people.

In fact, have we ever really been a nation of states united? More often we have a history of being a rather loose confederation of states. The recent Supreme Court decisions certifies that fact. By systematically weakening the federal government’s regulatory power we cripple that function and misplace it back to the gerrymandered regions which should have seceded long ago.

They have subverted the Constitution, institutionalized male dominance, installed a mock-Supreme Court which is an extension of a corporate wet dream preparing us for American-style fascism. The privileged life of a few has shown a profound indifference to our planet’s demise wrought by foul air, rising seas and aridification.  

I forgive you Abraham Lincoln. You picked the wrong general in McClellan, the wrong vice president in Johnson and the wrong night to go to the theater. But you were a fine writer and a moral philosopher. You underestimated the rot and fury of the man with the whip and the loathing planted in the soil of the South. If only you had listened to the future we wouldn’t be in this chapter of the Civil War without end. Waving goodbye to the new Confederacy would go a long way to our pursuit of happiness.