In October 1863, Abraham Lincoln thought Americans had much to be thankful for.
"In the midst of a civil war of unequalled magnitude and severity, which has sometimes seemed to foreign States to invite and provoke their aggression," he explained, "peace has been preserved with all nations, order has been maintained, and harmony has prevailed everywhere except in the theatre of military conflict". In spite of that conflict, he noted, "Needful diversions of wealth and of strength from the field of peaceful industry to the national defence . . . have not arrested the plough, the shuttle or the ship . . . [A]nd the country, rejoicing in the consciousness of augmented strength and vigor, is permitted to expect continuance of years, with large increase of freedom."
These contrasting realities -- between war and peace, deprivation and plenty, freedom and slavery -- flummoxed Lincoln. "No human counsel hath devised nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things," he admitted. In fact, they rarely co-exist. Large scale depravity overwhelms decency. Death ends life. Slavery suffocates freedom.
But they hadn't in mid-19th century America.
Even in the midst of a war that had produced greater carnage than any other.
This created a problem for Lincoln. Though a deist, he was not particularly religious. As an adult, he was not a member of any particular church, and as a politician he was at best circumspect in his confessions of faith -- unwilling to alienate Christian revivalists who reined supreme in the mid-west of his time but equally unwilling to embrace their excesses. He was also a child of the enlightenment and believed in reason and human agency.
Reason and agency, however, could not explain the country he observed in 1863.
And so, like many who cannot find a why in the sheer irrationality of what is, he was reduced to . . .
Prayer.
The ploughs, the shuttles, the ships, the neutrality of foreign adveraries and the sheer survival of the republican project that together made a "large increase of freedom" possible, were, he offered "the gracious gifts of the Most High God". And they required that we "set apart and observe the last Thursday next . . . as a day of Thanksgiving and praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens."
The proclamation did not end there. Along with thanks, Lincoln also demanded a national prayer for forgiveness. "I recommend," said the President, "that while offering up the ascriptions justly due Him for such singular deliverances and blessings," Americans "do . . . humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience." That "perverseness" had created innumerable "widows, orphans, mourners [and] sufferers".
In the months and years that followed, Lincoln poured content into that first Thanksgiving prayer. A little more than a month later, at Gettysburg, the "large increase of freedom" he perceived as dimly possible on Thanksgiving became the "unfinished work" of "a new birth of freedom" incumbent upon "us, the living". And a year and a half later, in the Second Inaugural, he sought to "bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and orphan".
For awhile this year, I was not sure we'd have much to be thankful for come tomorrow's fourth Thursday in November.
And then I remembered Lincoln and the first Thanksgiving.
Trump is still President. And he is still Trump. His lies continue, as does his neo-fascist assault on courts, competitors, the free press and anyone who opposes him. It is now reported that, last Spring, he was set to order the Justice Department to prosecute Hillary Clinton and James Comey. Last week, he pulled the press credentials of CNN's Jim Acosta, who he hates, and appointed an Acting Attorney General whose only obvious credential is consistent condemnation of the Mueller investigation. This week, he is again shilling for Saudi Arabia, buying -- or at least not rejecting -- the kingdom's false claim that its heir in waiting had nothing to do with the murder and dismemberment of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. And today, he is lamenting, as the product of an "Obama judge", a federal district court ruling in San Francisco that requires asylum proceedings for any aliens who enter the country, whether or not they come in at a port of entry.
But none of this has been accepted or taken lying down.
The White House counsel told Trump he'd be impeached if he ordered Justice to go after Clinton or Comey. The courts ordered him to restore Acosta's credentials, and are now hearing motions as to the constitutionality of the appointment of Matthew Whitaker as Acting Attorney General. No one is accepting Trump's defense of Saudi Arabia and prominent Senators are now set to investigate the President's gross servility, an obsequiousness that only faintly disguises the hatred he has for the free press. Trump's asylum order has been enjoined, and Chief Justice John Roberts just upbraided him. "We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges", said Roberts. "What we have," he added, is an "independent judiciary [for which] we should all be thankful".
In a little more than a month, we'll have a House of Representatives controlled by the Democrats. This is the product of a blue wave that overcame the most gerrymandered set of district lines the country has ever seen, a gerrymandering specifically designed to preserve Republican control of the House.
It failed.
To date, Congress has been transparently inept in holding Trump accountable and investigating his and his Administration's lies, authoritarianism, conflicts, emoluments and incompetence -- the in utero fascism that scares us all.
That ends on January 1.
Sometimes, as Yeats lamented, "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold/ . . . The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity."
This is not one of those times.
So . . .
Happy Thanksgiving.
Or, as Lincoln might say . . .
Thank God.
We'll apologize for Trump later.
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