My Wednesday column (posted last night):
It’s a shame that Brietbart.com, Drudge and other fire-eaters ginned up the ridiculous non-scandal scandal about the president omitting “under God” from his recitation of the Gettysburg Address. By now, it’s clear that Ken Burns, who filmed the speech for a special video compilation of various popular figures reading the speech, gave the president the “Nicolay Version” of Lincoln’s remarks, which didn’t contain the words “under God.”
Rather than besmirching the 150th anniversary of the address by shoehorning it into a too-obvious nod to the “Obama Is A Secret Muslim” conspiracy theory, followed by the usual ensuing political poop-flinging, the focus should’ve been squarely on the meaning and intent of the speech itself. November 19, 2013 was the perfect occasion for such a discussion since, in these intervening 150 years, President Lincoln’s thoughts about the war and the nation’s future have become lost in the grandeur of the words themselves.
Indeed, whenever we read the speech, we’re never really reading it, we’re almost always merely performing it — patriotic music playing softly in the background, while occasionally pausing on well-recognized examples of Lincoln’s erudition and statuesque turns-of-phrase including and especially “last full measure of devotion,” “our poor power to add or detract” or, of course, “government of the people, by the people, for the people.” Lincoln lived in a linguistic era that seems almost foreign to us now, sadly enough. Many more Americans in Lincoln’s time were, to varying degrees, trained in classics, ancient Greek, Latin; they were versed in one or more foreign languages, philosophy, classical and contemporaneous literature, theology and rhetoric. Lincoln’s self-taught background and big brain gave him the literary tools to be fully eloquent but with an economy of language — to say historically momentous things using just 269 words… [CONTINUE READING]