So viewing the issue, no choice was left but to call out the war power of the Government; and so to resist force, employed for its destruction, by force, for its preservation."

Abraham Lincoln addressing Congress on July 4, 1861.

"All we are saying, is give peace a chance."

The singer on the stage of the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), was performing not in August, 1939 ... or 1963 ... or even on September 10, 2001. He was singing on October 8, 2001.

I could see someone singing that song thousands of miles away, to Osama bin Laden and the Taliban. Or to the Hezbollah. Or Islamic Jihad. Or Hamas. Or Yasser Arafat. But in all such cases, the singer would be killed. Perhaps, out of respect for Islamic law, first his tongue would be cut out.

But the singer chose New York, of all places, to sing. New York, where Islam's war against America was declared with September 11th's surprise, terrorist attack to end all terrorist attacks.

There was but one reason why a man would be so foolish, and so wicked, as to sing such a song in a nation that was still digging out unidentifiable body parts, and will still be doing so six months from now. Because he can.

He received a thunderous ovation.

The performance was part of a charity concert given for the victims of "the unfortunate events of September 11," as an organizer working the aisles announced, while seeking additional, cash donations. I stumbled onto the benefit, on left-of-Clinton WNYC-FM 93.9.

A woman read the multicultural doggerel of omniscient census taker laureate Maya Angelou. Angelou's um, poem, sounded more like a rebuke than a rallying call to a nation under attack:

Each of you a bordered country,
Delicate and strangely made proud,
Yet thrusting perpetually undersiege
Your armed struggles for profit
Have left collars of waste upon
My shore, currents of debris upon my breast.
Yet, today I call you to my riverside,
If you will study war no more. Come,
Clad in peace and I will sing the songs
The Creator gave to me when I and the
Tree and the Rock were one.
Before cynicism was a bloody sear across your
Brow and when you yet knew you still
Knew nothing.
The River sings and sings on.

There is a true yearning to respond to
The singing River and the wise Rock.
So say the Asian, the Hispanic, the Jew
The African, the Native American, the Sioux,
The Catholic, the Muslim, the French, the Greek
The Irish, the Rabbi, the Priest, the Sheikh,
The Gay, the Straight, the Preacher,
The privileged, the homeless, the Teacher.
They all hear
The speaking of the Tree....

Lift up your faces, you have a piercing need
For this bright morning dawning for you.
History, despite its wrenching pain,
Cannot be unlived, but if faced
With courage, need not be lived again."

If you will study war no more.

In Spring, 1980, I helped organize a rally against re-instituting the draft at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. (The Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan, and war drums were beating here, too.) I did so for purely personal reasons. I had offered my services to my nation's military only five years earlier, been rebuffed (flat feet), and did not desire to be called to duty when it was convenient for the government. (My mother warned me, "Don't worry. If they need you, they'll take you.") And I was one of a few people at Stony Brook, who, when something needed to be organized, did the organizing. I wasn't a socialist or a vegetarian, either, yet I ran the campus' vegetarian co-operative restaurant, Harkness East.

A long-haired, bearded fellow, who was counseling people about declaring for "conscientious objector" status, told me, "I couldn't counsel you on being a conscientious objector, because you're not a pacifist."

The fellow was speaking in code: NONE of the people he was counseling was a pacifist. Nor was he. This fellow was just another Marxist who supported those who warred AGAINST America. He knew that I wasn't a Marxist; that's why he couldn't "counsel" me.

The high point of the BAM benefit, was a performance of Aaron Copland's Lincoln Portrait. In the Lincoln Portrait, which enjoyed its inaugural performance in 1943, the first two, purely musical parts evoke Lincoln's early years, and the clash of Union and Confederate forces. The third part is dominated by words about and by Lincoln.

Abraham Lincoln was born in Kentucky, raised in Indiana, and lived in Illinois.

The words are set up by a beautiful musical and philosophical conceit that is equal parts Copland and Lincoln. In Lincoln's "Gettysburg Address," he called for a "new birth of freedom." And in his "Second Inaugural," he called for the peace, then within sight, to be one in which the North would not simply impose its will upon the South. This was as beautiful a thought as it was a political impossibility. But Copland realized it, musically.

With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan -- to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.

In A Lincoln Potrait, one section of the orchestra plays point -- an arrangement of Stephen Foster's "Camptown Races," to evoke the Army of the Confederacy. Another section follows, as counterpoint, evoking a cavalry charge by the Army of the Potomac. The two sections then merge into one indistinguishable (and unstoppable) host.

A Lincoln Portrait wasn't really about Honest Abe; it was about FDR. Aaron Copland was rallying support for FDR's crusade against Hitler, Mussolini, and Tojo. Since Lincoln had already been deified, but FDR was then yet a man, it made perfect sense politically, to use the Great Emancipator to front for the Great Welfare Statist.

In my recording, Henry Fonda reads the text in that flat prairie delivery of his that I learned as a youngster to identify with Lincoln, with being presidential, with telling the truth.

It is the eternal struggle between these two principles -- right and wrong -- throughout the world.... It is the same spirit that says, 'You work and toil and earn bread, and I'll eat it.' No matter in what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation and live by the fruit of their labor, or from one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle."

From the October 15, 1858 Lincoln-Douglas Debate at Alton.

But the performance at BAM had no Fonda -- he died in 1983. Hell, the folks at BAM didn't even stick to Copland's text. The actor who read the text was declaiming; it made him sound like he had something to sell. And the words were themselves deceitful. Mixed in with some of the Lincoln statements from the Lincoln Portrait, the penultimate statement was one about not restricting civil liberties in time of war.

I had never heard such a statement attributed to Lincoln, and never heard anything remotely like it in other performances of the Lincoln Portrait. While Abe Lincoln may have done much good in his life, he was no friend of civil liberties. During his prosecution of the Civil War/War Between the States, he handcuffed the U.S. Constitution, shut down all opposition newspapers, jailed his critics, and suspended what German constitutional theorist Martin Kriele has called the most basic of rights, habeas corpus. Habeas corpus means that you cannot be jailed without being charged with a crime. No American president ever prosecuted a war more ruthlessly than Lincoln did.

It is possible to honestly debate the legitimacy of suspending freedoms during wartime, but it is not possible to portray Abe Lincoln as a defender of civil liberties.

Indeed, since it was BAM, an institution devoted to defining, for New York, the content of political correctness, the audience was full of people who had devoted their lives to the destruction of the U.S. Constitution, and the suppression of liberty. BAM's customers absolutely support gun control -- except for the bodyguards of famous gun control advocates. They absolutely support the "wall between church and state" -- except for Muslim public school children, for whom they set up special rooms to pray in New York City public schools during Ramadan. And they absolutely support freedom of speech -- except for those who are "intolerant" -- meaning those who would attack affirmative action, oppose gay rights, or "verbally assault" (criticize) feminists. And they absolutely support equality before the law -- for blacks, women, gays, immigrants ... and Muslims. Now, like our Canadian neighbor, Peter Jennings, these good people have suddenly discovered the U.S. Constitution.

Out of LOYALTY to the Union, which he would go to any length to preserve, Abe Lincoln was willing to temporarily sacrifice the rule of law, and permanently sacrifice 650,000 American boys and men.

Out of DISLOYALTY to the Union, the folks at BAM, and those demonstrating elsewhere in America for "peace" -- many of whom glory in the title, "race traitors" -- seek to permanently sacrifice the rule of law, and any number of their fellow citizens. They continue to support those whom they consider America's violent enemies at home and abroad, while seeking ever, through the schools and universities and media, to silence the "mystic chords of memory" that remind us of our patriotic past, with the goal of rending the Union.

For whom would the American Left now use Abe Lincoln as a front man?

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