Lincoln vs. Polk

It has been a while since I have had some Vonnegut up on here. I bring it back today with one of my favorite passages from A Man Without A Country.

"What did Abraham Lincoln have to say about America’s imperialist wars, the ones that, on one noble pretext or another, aim to increase the natural resources and pools of tame labor available to the richest Americans who have the best political connections?

It is almost always a mistake to mention Abraham Lincoln. He always steals the show. I am about to quote him again.

More than a decade before his Gettysburg Address, back in 1848, when Lincoln was only a Congressman, he was heartbroken and humiliated by our war on Mexico, which had never attacked us. James Polk was the person Representative Lincoln had in mind when he said what he said. Abraham Lincoln said of Polk, his president, his armed forces’ commander-in-chief:

Trusting to escape a scrutiny, by fixing the public gaze upon the exceeding brightness of military glory—that attractive rainbow, that rises in showers of blood—that serpent’s eye, that charms to destroy—he plunged into war.

Holy shit! And I thought I was a writer!"

Vonnegut writes on and eventually comes to that much glorified battle at the Alamo.

“Remember the Alamo? With that war we were making California our own, and a lot of other people and properties, and doing it as though butchering Mexican soldiers who were only defending their homeland against invaders wasn’t murder. What other stuff besides California? Well, Texas, Utah, Nevada, Arizona, and parts of New Mexico, Colorado, and Wyoming.”

I loved these passages because they are so poignant to issues of today—a war in Iraq and illegal immigration—that they give me comfort in knowing a great man, Lincoln, thought it necessary to point out the President’s misjudgment. Now you cannot say much like that without being labeled un-American, disloyal, and treasonous by the commander-in-chief.

Lincoln would be pretty pissed off.