FROTHING AT THE MOUTH

 It seems in this day and age that everybody is offended by everything. A starlet wears her skirt too short, and the Twitterverse explodes with angry tweets. And the angry tweets provoke other angry tweets condemning the tweeters as twits. Then she wears her skirt too long, and we get another Twitterwar. Someone makes a casual, thoughtless remark that they would never have made if their brains had been in gear, and loud calls are made to "cancel" that person. If someone thoughtlessly refers to a person as "he" when the preferred pronoun is "ze," this is a crime against humanity. 

Fortunes are lost and careers are ended at the slip of a tongue, and almost nobody is immune to censure for the slightest offense. It's somewhat like swatting a fly with a sledgehammer.  

In the land of the First Amendment, you risk ruin every time you open your mouth. The PC police have a fundamentalist view of all transgressions against Wokeness. The least insensitive comment engenders cries for the harshest punishment. 

Many people with a strong survival instinct act as though their every word and action are being recorded on an enemy's cellphone video. Aesop is supposed to have said: "Wise men say nothing in dangerous times", and that quote has seldom been truer than it is today. Of course, the original version of Aesop's quote had been cancelled due to the man's obvious misogyny and has been gender-neutralized as "Wise people say nothing in dangerous times." Is there a statue of Aesop anywhere that can be torn down?

Anyone born prior to 1950 who has ever transgressed the least prohibition of the 21st century's version of morality is to be cancelled, written out of the history books as a hero and made a villain, and any statues of them must be torn down. 

That bigoted racist, Winston Churchill, who was largely responsible for saving Europe during World War II, is supposed to have said that a people who are at war with their past have no future. I agree.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN'S TEETH versus DONALD TRUMP'S TONGUE

 

At a recent campaign stop in Iowa, Donald Trump made some interesting comments:

 

“The Civil War was so fascinating, so horrible,” Trump said. “So many mistakes were made. See, there was something I think could have been negotiated, to be honest with you. I think you could have negotiated that. All the people died, so many people died. You know, that was the disaster.”

 

Trump went on to describe the Civil War as “vicious” and suggested that “Abraham Lincoln, of course, if he negotiated it, you probably wouldn’t even know who Abraham Lincoln was.” Trump says Civil War ‘could have been negotiated.’ Historians disagree. - TheWashington Post

 

Ambrose Bierce, who served as an officer in the Union Army wrote that warfare “untied with the teeth a political knot which would not yield to the tongue.” Contrary to Trump's assertion, the political knot that led to the Civil War could not be untied with the tongue.

 

The question of whether to negotiate was settled in the election of 1864. George McClellan ran against Lincoln on a ticket which included negotiating an end to the war. Lincoln’s re-election, which was aided by Union soldiers returning home on furlough to vote, demonstrated that negotiating a compromise wasn’t favored by either side, regardless of what Lincoln did.

 

A negotiated settlement would have been near impossible for the following reasons:

 

The Southern leadership (aka the slave-owning planter class) had been losing influence in national politics for years. The population boom in the North was beginning to overpower the Southern leadership in the House of Representatives. The addition of states in areas incompatible with slavery threatened to erode the Southern leadership’s influence in the Senate.

 

The Southern leadership decided that if their economy was to survive, it had to expand its influence or withdraw from the Union. The Southern leadership saw the election of Abraham Lincoln as a sign that its national influence was going to continue to wane; therefore, they seceded.

 

At the outset of the war, Lincoln’s stated aim was to preserve the Union, not abolish slavery. His views changed over the course of the war. He came to the conclusion that the only way to preserve the Union was to abolish slavery. Shortly before the publication of his Emancipation Proclamation Horace Greeley, the publisher of The New York Tribune, complained that Lincoln had no real policy for the Civil War.

 

Lincoln replied with a letter to The New York Tribune in which he said: “I would save the Union. I would save it the shortest way under the Constitution. The sooner the national authority can be restored; the nearer the Union will be ‘the Union as it was.’ If there were those who would not save the Union, unless they could at the same time save slavery, I do not agree with them. If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time destroy slavery, I do not agree with them. My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union.”

 

After Lincoln’s death, Greeley wrote that he though Lincoln’s letter was intended to prepare the public for his revised war aim—to free the slaves. Lincoln had decided that he could not preserve the Union by compromising on the issue of slavery with the Southern leadership. Any compromise acceptable to the North would continue the erosion of the Southern leadership’s influence in national politics through population growth in the North and the addition of new Free States, and the Southern leadership saw such erosion as leading to the inevitable destruction of their economy and the ruin of the planter class.