The Reason for the Season

And here's someone who got into the spirit of the season.

I suppose one day dictionary apps will describe "Thanksgiving" as an archaic term for the day that precedes the traditional Black Friday holiday.

What's More than More?

American ruling-class philosophy, 21st century style.

Lincoln Thinkin'

You can always tell when I am impressed with myself, because I meme me.

Ancient Chinese Secret, Huh?

By Dan Hagen

Americans wink in that knowing way that says, “It’s all about being rich, man. Everything else we say is just stuff to con the rubes.”

Build to be rich, inherit to be rich, cheat to be rich, play to be rich, pray to be rich, preach to be rich, murder to be rich, ruin to be rich — the only two words that matter in those phrases are “Be rich!” ITCH to be rich.

Americans whistle past the graveyard of their authenticity by chanting high-flown phrases about their sweet saviors and metaphorical cities on symbolic hills and traditional American values.

But a wink will serve to nervously remind them that at the center of all that is nothing, an aggressive emptiness, a moral vacuum that echoes with the meaningless doggerel that is the detritus of money grubbing. Two Mints in One. Melts in Your Mouth, Not in Your Hand. Mister Clean, Mister Clean, Mister Clean!

Ancient Chinese Secret, Huh?

King Midas by Saturninus

Nearer, My Quad, to Thee

By Dan Hagen

Old Main photo by Janice Hunt

Crossing with the pedestrian light at 4^th and Lincoln this morning, I was nearly run down. And yes, my last sight would have been the one I have been expecting to see for a decade now — a wide-eyed woman behind a windshield, talking on her goddamned cell phone. I gave her a good scowl and took a mindful breath, determined to let the sight of the campus relax me.

Walking to my campus office in the early morning over a holiday break, moving alone across that stately vastness utterly emptied of people, is an experience that seems symbolic of something existential, a mute question for which I have no answer. The only movement is the gamboling of squirrels, the only sound birdsong and the occasional rich, welcome toll of a bell tower.

I’d liken it to the opening of some Stephen King novel, but the feeling is friendlier and weightier than that. It’s like an abandoned park where children once played long into the dusk, or some afterthought of an afterlife.

The Fateful Lightning of 'Lincoln'

By Dan Hagen

An Illinois boy, I’ve been bored by the deification of Abraham Lincoln, that mushy, rotten-apple worship that has prompted thousands of books about him and seems to have subtly tainted every screen portrayal of the man.

Daniel Day-Lewis as the martyred 16th president

I always smelled a rodent there. Men who become symbols also become the vehicle for somebody else’s agenda.

Besides, if Lincoln was a humble, woodsy rail-splitter grown to godhood, then his emancipation of a people was no trick at all, right? Freeing whole peoples is what gods do. It would seem to be one of their hobbies.

But Daniel Day-Lewis, in Stephen Spielberg’s Lincoln, is no god. Noble, long-suffering, yes, but always human, pressed to perform a task that seems just about humanly impossible — the moral elevation of a society determined to resist it.

What Day-Lewis seems to be is not a deity but — and I’m reluctant to gush in this way — President Lincoln.

Sitting between Paul Beals and Matt Mattingly, I felt more than once that I was actually seeing Lincoln, and choked up more than once, too, hearing similar soft gurgles from either side.

In this definitive performance, Day-Lewis’ reedy voice pleads and ponders, cajoles and compels, finally rising, when he is sufficiently provoked, to ringing moral imperative. His eyes twinkle, light with sly insight, deepen to reflect the still waters of compassion, and finally grow opaque to hint at the operation of a genius just beyond our reach. Day-Lewis uses Lincoln’s homespun shaggy-dog humor to woo others, to relieve Lincoln’s own considerable tensions but also, I think, as a trick to blind people to the operation of an intelligence they might otherwise fear.

Day-Lewis sometimes moves — for example, while embracing his boy Tad or clapping a friend on the knee — with a matter-of-fact openness that suggests a man who understands love and thirsts for it. A single deft scene — in which Lincoln compliments his father’s insight while ruefully hinting that they loathed each other — suggests a source for that thirst.

Daniel Day-Lewis, beleaguered but "clothed in immense power."

As abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens, Tommy Lee Jones is here to flash his familiar trick — flat, unanswerable, hard-bitten wit — in a role that provides a perfect fit for it. Sally Field makes Mary Todd Lincoln a fully sympathetic character by showing us the urgent, vulnerable empathy that she has brought to the best roles of her career, as well as that spunky determination that makes her character easily a match for anyone who cares to cross her. David Strathairn, James Spader and Joseph Gordon-Levitt round out a top-flight cast at the top of its game.

And what playthings this play has provided for these distinguished professionals. Tony Kushner’s dialogue has the bracing, emphatic clarity of lightning cutting right across an ominous, roiling sky. It is Chayefsky-like, romantic, far-sighted, swiftly intelligent, elevated in tone and concern.

These are articulate Americans — not indifferent to education, as we are now, but determined to use their hard-won eloquence in the service of the greatest moral crisis in the nation’s history. The fact that they know what’s at stake — the end or the perpetuation of nothing less than human enslavement — lends their political struggles a thriller-like desperation, played out against a backdrop of wartime personal problems that might paralyze others. Mere ticking time bombs seem ho-hum by comparison.

No one is going to walk out of that theatre muttering the familiar cynical cheap shot that the Civil War “wasn’t about slavery,” or that slavery’s finish was accidental or inevitable — not after seeing the chess-like ingenuity, deft deceptions, philosophical clarity, emotional exhaustion and sheer courageous cussedness that these characters must deploy to get the job, finally and forever, done.

As the film ended, the packed-house audience, knowing the actors couldn’t hear them, applauded them anyway.
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Nov. 26, 2012, update. I saw "Lincoln" again yesterday afternoon, and it was if anything more powerful the second time around. 
I think this movie will live, and perhaps counterbalance "Gone With the Wind" as the overriding popular culture image of the Civil War. 
Yesterday I could stop talking in my Day-Lewis Lincoln voice. I never saw the like of it. Never saw the like.

The Clown Car Runs Right Out of Gas

Illustration by Esquire

Now the Republicans wonder why on Earth they didn’t win. After all, for the position of leader of the most powerful nation on the planet, they offered their best ­—a slimy Newt, a skirt-chasing pizza putz, a Texas two-digit IQ, a sanctimonious sweater vest, Crazy Eyes Bachmann and the Romneybot 3000 v 2.0, a device that dispenses lies with the well-oiled ease that a vending machine spits out gumballs.

And of course, the Republicans will conclude they lost because they didn’t crank up their Insane Clown Posse whoops of fascist derangement to a sufficiently deafening decibel level.

Yes, the Republicans certainly crammed their clown car full on this trip.

Meanwhile, Romney — who claims he lost because of those nasty, lazy blacks, bitches and spics — is the gift that keeps on giving.
Yet Republicans do not seem to appreciate Mitt's continuing help to them. "How ungrateful," he chortled.