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I was born four score and seven years after Abraham Lincoln died.

That’s a cute little coincidence, but it’s more than that: it tells me that on the day I was born, there were people living in this country who had been born as slaves.

Not many of them, certainly. But there were lots and lots of people who had learned about American slavery directly from parents, grandparents, aunts or uncles who had actually been slaves.

Imagine that.

Abraham Lincoln has always seemed almost mythical to me, like a figure from Mount Olympus. His life, his presidency and his death seem frozen in amber, immutable and inevitable. Yet, on the day I was born, there were probably a handful of people still living who had once, as children, heard him speak.

When Lincoln himself was born, Thomas Jefferson was president. By the time Lincoln was president, Jefferson and his peers had become creatures of myth.

Time turns life into history and history into mythology. We wait for a mythical leader to appear and solve our problems, but life has never worked that way. As Barack Obama said during the 2008 campaign: “We are the people we’ve been waiting for.” If our problems are to be solved, we have to do it ourselves.

From Lincoln’s second annual message to Congress (the State of the Union Message of his time):

Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this administration will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance or insignificance can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down in honor or dishonor to the last generation.

What we do, or fail to do, matters. That’s no myth.

This is real: the Republican National Committee gets into the spirit with a selection of e-cards for Valentine’s Day.

Oh, the spirit of love is in the air!

We’re approaching the first anniversary of Barack Obama’s inauguration, so you can expect plenty of year-in-review stories. Rachel Maddow prepares us for the “Obama’s a failure” storyline we’re sure to hear from Republicans:

The news story:

Evangelical broadcaster Pat Robertson says Haiti has been “cursed” because of what he called a “pact with the devil” in its history.

The prayer:

Dear Lord, you know I don’t like to ask you for anything. You know I’ve never asked you to do harm to anyone.

Well, I’m asking now. Please, Lord, strike down Pat Robertson with a bolt of lightning. Preferably in broad daylight with lots of witnesses.

I don’t believe Robertson was speaking for You about Haiti, any more than I believed he was speaking for You when he said Ariel Sharon’s stroke was Your vengeance for peace overtures to the Palestinians, or when he said Hurricane Katrina was Your wrath over abortion, or that 9/11 was Your response to secularism in America.

The problem is, he claims to be speaking for You, and some people believe it. It’s not good for us, and it’s not good for You. Some people think, “If that’s what God’s all about, I’m gonna be an atheist.”

One well-aimed bolt of lightning would do a lot to clear up this confusion.

Amen.

The answer:

Do you know who you sound like just now? Pat Robertson.

God, I’m so ashamed.

Cartoonist Tom Tomorrow reviews 2009: The Year in Crazy. There’s also a part two.

We’ve got shortages of all sorts of things, but we do seem to have an inexhaustible supply of The Crazy.

Via Daring Fireball, here’s an animated map showing the advance of unemployment in the current recession.

Cartoonist Ruben Bolling explains the stock market, and perhaps the whole economy.

Because we know that terrorists all have superhuman powers, and can be held only in specially-constructed prison cells made of kryptonite-reinforced concrete, John Gruber has started a log to keep track of who’s a-scared of terrorists.

BEN FRANKLIN WAS NOT AFRAID

“Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”
–Benjamin Franklin, 1755

HOUSE MINORITY LEADER JOHN BOEHNER IS AFRAID OF THE TERRORISTS

The Hill:

House Minority Leader John Boehner said that Republicans will attempt to force Democratic leaders to hold a vote on a bill that would ban Guantanamo Bay detainees from being transferred to the United States.

And so on.

Cartoonist Jim Morin shows us a real healthcare death panel, and Pat Oliphant unmasks another merchant of death.

(Both discovered via All Hat No Cattle.)

DJ Tom Clay created this audio mashup back in 1971. I hadn’t heard it for a long time, but I remembered it instantly.

Paul Krugman, on Real Time With Bill Maher:

These past thirty years, the Right in America has had two big things: it was Social Conservatism and Economic Conservatism. And “we’re gonna stop all of these, gayness and drugs and sex and miscegenation and all these things,” right? They’re gonna stop all that, and “we’re gonna cut taxes on the rich and we’re gonna deregulate and we’re gonna make it possible…”

And they’ve lost all the battles on the social side. America’s gotten more and more liberal on the social side. Won almost all the battles on the economic side.

That’s not an accident. That’s a question of priorities. They actually kinda like seeing the social liberals keep on winning, ’cause it keeps their base riled up, so they can win the other stuff.

2004 — anybody remember that election? Bush ran as the nation’s defender against gay-married terrorists, and then two days after the election he said, “and now I have a mandate to privatize social security.” Right? That will show you what it’s really about.

As a social liberal, I have a hard time accepting that people of my ilk have “kept on winning” on social issues. Maybe it’s true in the long term. I do remember that George W. Bush insisted we needed a Constitutional Amendment to ban gay marriage before the 2004 election, and dropped the issue immediately after the election. I remember reading some proponent of gay rights who said it showed that Bush’s heart was in the right place. Personally, I thought it showed that nobody should trust George W. Bush as far as they could throw the Washington Monument.

I’ve been catching up on a backlog of TV programs I’ve recorded but not yet watched. I just watched a film called Money-Driven Medicine that ran last month on Bill Moyer’s Journal. (I thought you could watch it online, but it’s not working for me. Don’t miss seeing it if you get a chance. It’s educational, and moving.)

The narrator introduces a Harvard professor of medical economics named Rashi Fein by quoting him:

We live in a society, not just in an economy.

That’s a good point, I think. It should be obvious, but somehow I think we’ve forgotten that fact in recent decades. It would be good to remember it from now on.

Cartoonist Ruben Bolling looks at how the government is cracking down on malefactors in the banking industry a year after the economy collapsed. (Click the image to see the entire cartoon.)

All Hat No Cattle has discovered the GOP Healthcare Plan. You know, I thought it was a joke until I came to point five in the plan; then it sounded just like the Republicans. (Click the image to see the whole plan, and when you get there, scroll down and look at some of the other cartoons there. I particularly like the press asking whether Obama’s overexposed, and the quote of Dom Hélder Câmara.)

GOP HEALTH CARE PLAN
The “Stay Well, America” Act

The Republican health care plan is very simple.

1. If you are sick, something is obviously wrong with you.
2. If you believe in personal responsibility, then you know that ’something wrong with you’ is your fault.
3. Why should the government pay to fix something that is your fault?
4. The way to put things right again in life is to get right with God. And prayer is free.
5. Therefore, we demand a tax cut.

Stay well, America.

(I’ve put the text here because it’s only an image at All Hat No Cattle, and wouldn’t show up on a web search.)

Rachel Maddow uses a crash test to suggest that government regulation may not be entirely bad:

This is what 50 years of safety regulations forced on industry looks like. Which of these cars would you rather be in in this crash?