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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region Forums"America, a One-Act Play - Three presidents walk into a room ..."
America, a One-Act Play
Three presidents walk into a room ...
STEVE ERICKSON NOVEMBER 28, 2012
For a while now Ive had a play in my head called Three Presidents that, not being a playwright, I havent had the wherewithal to think through. The third and sixteenth presidents of the United States meet in front of the White House and introduce themselves. Number 16 knows all about Number 3, of course, while Number 3 is at once charmed and slightly disconcerted that in its selection of presidents like Number 16, the country has become so populist, so Jeffersonian. After remarking on how the White House is rather less approachable than in their own times, the two men eventually file through security into the West Wing, and finally are escorted into the Oval Office. This in itself captivates them, since the Oval Office as we now know it is less than 80 years old. The former presidents hand their coats to the valet and make themselves at home, and after a brief interlude begin to wonder aloud when the current president will appear, at which point the rather bemused black man holding their coats informs his predecessors that the current president has already appeared.
America is encrypted in the mathematical sequence 3 > 16 > 44. For different reasons, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Barack Obama are in the news latelyone the subject of a book, the other of a movie, the third of an election. They are related by more than their office; in one fashion or another, the great national crucible of race lies at the center of each of their stories. Jefferson embodies the American contradiction, his thoughts and actions and life all at odds. As a young member of the Virginia legislature when the state still was a British colony, he introduced futile anti-slavery measures before going back home where his slaves awaited him, just as he wrote an anti-slavery clause in the Declaration of Independence that was excised in part so that his own state would sign. Cheap psychoanalysis is irresistible. Did Jefferson strike anti-slavery postures that he knew were doomed, so that he could tell himself he tried to live up to his ideals in the face of both his own corruption and a system that allowed more for that corruption than for idealism? As the years passed, his excuses grew more feeble as circumstances grew more complicatedincluding the 37-year relationship with a slave by whom he had six children, and finances so ruinous that, put crudely, his slaves were among his only assetsuntil at the end, the man whose written words of equality electrified the world couldnt bring himself to write the word slavery in his otherwise exhaustive correspondence with rival John Adams. Jefferson was America walking like a man, to paraphrase a Robert Johnson bluesits idealism and betrayal, its transcendence and rapaciousness.
If anyone else lays claim to authorship of the American idea, its Lincoln, 17 years old and living in Indiana (where his family moved because it wasnt a slave state) when Jefferson died on the 50th anniversary of the first July 4th. Lincoln confirms as much as any single figure historys Great Man theory, which leftists disdain as overly romantic, but he only became that great man in the last three years of his life, during which he rewrote and updated Jefferson in his November 1863 speech at the Gettysburg cemetery. Then, at his second inauguration a month before his murder, he gave the single most revolutionary speech ever by a president. This was the address that stipulated the price that the country must pay for debasing the Jeffersonian ideal; it was an address that explicitly said God wasnt on our side because, in our ownership of human beings, we hadnt been on Gods side. Given the agendas that people bring to their perspectives on Lincoln, its easy to lose track of what an accelerating work in progress he was on the issue of race. While a founder of the Republican Party as an anti-slavery party, he wasnt an abolitionist when he emerged as the dark-horse victor on the third ballot at the partys 1860 convention; early in his presidency, slavery was of secondary concern to Union-saving. By the end of his first term, however, Lincoln plotted with Frederick Douglass in the White House the sort of guerrilla raids on Southern plantations for which he condemned John Brown five years before. He emerged as his nations pre-eminent visionary when his views of America and race aligned into something morally and philosophically (and, it should be acknowledged, strategically) coherent.
Lincoln and Jefferson possessed an imagination at least as sweeping as their intelligence, so its possible that sometime mid-conversation there in the Oval Office, they might actually start to wrap their heads around the fact before them that takes the form of the 44th president. Obama might remind Lincoln of the long-ago trip down the Mississippi and the sight of men in chains on auction blocks that haunted him the rest of his life; as the son of mixed-race parentage, at a height similar to Jeffersons, he might remind the third president of the sons by his slave-mistress. These sons so reminded visitors to Monticello of Jefferson himself that the truth of the relationship with Sally Hemings was indisputable long before DNA caught up with the impostor that called itself history. Unclear even to a fly on the Oval Office wall at this meeting is whether the sudden vantage point of a couple of centuries would lead Jefferson to muse, as Obama might well muse, how it has been that the country always was more offended by Jefferson sleeping with a black woman than owning her. Now the same country elects, twice, a biracial Hawaiianthe stuff of a Lincolnian tall tale. What Jefferson and Lincoln would grasp more quickly is why Obamas image has been radicalized by many in the same country beyond what reality supports, why Fox Nation insists on creating an Obama who doesnt exist and who bears no resemblance to the Obama the rest of the country knows. In many ways, Number 44 is a political conservative compared to his two guests whom Tea Party patriots claim to so revere.
http://prospect.org/article/america-one-act-play
Ending: "Each has considerable reasons for being awed by the other two. Each is the incarnation, and therefore the keeper, of the American Promise...each understands that, at the very moment in 1776 when we made that American Promise, we broke it, and have spent the 236 years since trying to keep it."
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"America, a One-Act Play - Three presidents walk into a room ..." (Original Post)
Pirate Smile
Nov 2012
OP
niyad
(113,079 posts)1. very interesting
Pirate Smile
(27,617 posts)2. I thought so too. n/t
Pirate Smile
(27,617 posts)3. Kick