Abraham, Steven and Dan

Just the other day, I saw Lincoln.  No, not the movie- the man.  All kidding aside, I can truly say that when I emerged from the theater, I felt that I had just spent two hours with the world’s most troubled soul since Job.

This poor guy’s time was divided up with the need to pay attention to his unhinged, tormented harridan of a wife, grieve for a lost son, play with a young living one, stand firm with a defiant older one, arm-twist, speechify, amuse, spin a yarn, cajole, threaten, josh and deceive.

In short, practice “politics- the art of the possible.”  Not to mention, negotiate the last days of the Civil War and race to pass the Thirteenth Amendment before the conflict’s close.

And the experience was awesome.  In the purest (not surfer) meaning of the word.  Think of what you’ve got here.

In the beginning there was the Word.  And here all the words are exquisitely written by that Angel in America himself- Tony Kushner.  And he knows lots of them.

Some are lofty, some earthy, some moving, some hilarious, some hurtful, all brilliant, and all perfectly-chosen.  And he harnesses his majestic talent to serve a great biography, Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals- the “bible” of this endeavor.

(Sidebar:  When I worked for Pioneer Press my boss, the wonderful Dorothy Andries, invited me to hear Doris lecture.  What a treat.  No surprise that she was a brilliant and entertaining speaker.)

Then you have the prodigious talents of Daniel Day-Lewis.  Academy Award winner twice in the past, his Lincoln performance is a shoe-in for the hat trick.  To compare this guy’s acting chops to anyone else’s this year is just not fair.  They ought to give him the Oscar and then permanently retire him to an Actor’s Hall of Fame and let the other boys have a chance.

And last, but in no way least, is the Wizard of Jaws himself, the legendary Steven Spielberg.  The majesty and scope of the subject- Abraham Lincoln- and the subject matter- The Civil War and slavery-  this is the stuff he was born to direct.  He needed every bit of his genius, talent, know-how and money to do this film justice.  And does he ever bring it.

But as he pans over the carnage and we think back to other attacks on American soil, it is hard to comprehend that this slaughter was not the work of a crazy terrorist jihad or a mean-minded hurricane with the cheerleader name- Sandy.

This is one American killing another.  “Brother against brother” in the parlance of the day.  Simply incomprehensible.  If some foreign nation wreaked one thousandth of the havoc on our citizenry that this whirlwind did, we would have obliterated them from the face of the earth.  But these soldiers and military masterminds were ALL American.  An unbelivable concept to grasp.

I urge you all to go see this.  I hesitate to call it a movie.  Skyfall is a movie- and a fun one.  This is an experience in time travel and a lesson in making hard moral choices.

On a different note, one of my own personal heroes, “Marse Robert,” the very noble and tragic Robert E. Lee, has a cameo appearance near the end of the movie.  The moment I saw them lead in old Traveler, his almost-equally famous horse, I knew General Lee would not be far behind.

His talents and abilities matched Lincoln’s.  As number one cadet in his graduating class at West Point, he was a model soldier and a brilliant engineer.  Did you know that President Lincoln offered him the command of the Union Army first?  Think about that. He did.  Long and hard.  The generals he was going to have to face and kill were his college classmates, chums, and old Army comrades.

His father, “Light Horse Harry” was an officer in the Revolutionary War.  His wife, Mary, was a relation of Martha Washington.  He fought valiantly in the Mexican-American War, and he himself had been the “Supe,” Superintendant of the United States Military Academy at West Point.

Your blood doesn’t get more red, white and blue than that.  But he was a Virginian first and an American second.

Much to his ever-lasting sorrow.  In a way, his end game was more tragic than Lincoln’s. He didn’t die after Appomattox Court House.  He lived to see everything he loved and revered destroyed.

Starting with his beloved home, Arlington.  As punishment for his war crimes, Lee’s stately home and magnificent grounds were not only seized, they were turned into a cemetary.  His family, never able to return to a property that had belonged to them for generations, had to suffer the horror of watching it being turned into a mass graveyard for the “enemy” dead.

Today we only think of Arlington National Cemetary as a sacred place where JFK, RFK and other distinguished vets are buried with pomp and circumstance.  And it is.  But imagine if someone took your dear house and did this right in front of your horrified eyes.

I guess I’m saying that the whole nation paid a huge price for that war.  Concepts won. Freedom won.  Right won.  The evil and abomination of slavery was abolished, thank God. But the cost in human misery was incalculable- and in many ways continues to this very day.

Blue State?  Red State?  At least 625,000 American boys died back then because of that very same divisiveness.  And can we honestly say that their deaths settled things today?

It all depends on your point of view.  One day, the famous film triple threat and six-time Academy Award winner, writer-director-producer Joe Mankiewicz came upon his Austrian-born wife reading a book and crying her eyes out.

“What’s wrong?” he asked her anxiously.

“Oh, Joe,” she sobbed.  “I’m right in the middle of Gone with the Wind and if the South loses, I’ll kill myself!”

I know Abe Lincoln, the Great Emancipator himself, would have grinned at that one.