Open Thread Abe Lincoln Day


300px-Young_Lincoln_By_Charles_Keck.JPG

Abraham Lincoln was born on February 12th, 1809 in a one-room log cabin at Sinking Spring farm, south of Hodgenville in Hardin County, Kentucky. That's roughly 210 years ago today, folks.

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"that lawless and mobocratic spirit ... which is already abroad in the land, and is spreading with rapid and fearful impetuosity, to the ultimate overthrow of every institution, or even moral principle, in which persons and property have hitherto found security."
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Welcome back my friends. Today we celebrate the birth of old Abe Lincoln, the legend and the 16th US president. He entangled affairs during portentous times -- Dred Scott, failure of the Whig party, beginning of republicanism, secession of the Confederate States, the 'Cival War', change to greenbacks, Emancipation Proclamation, Gettysburg Address, and the beginning of the Reconstruction. All while western territorial expansion "Indian Treaties", Indian wars and land grabs were ablaze. Defining moments in US history.

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Known as a gifted orator, self-educated lawyer and part time abolitionist, he also tried his hand at banking and running an army. But theater was his downfall. Ever wonder why his image is stamped on our penny, the lowest valued coinage in the realm?

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Hope there are enough of those brown wooden Lincoln logs around here to build debatable topics. Lay 'em out, notch them in and make your own cabin in the sticks. Then yell at all the trees about what you would do with a 'civil war'. The loss of regional control has never been the same. Some groups south of the Mason Dixon line (and out west) are still fighting the idea of a national state.

It seems like regional authority has the geographically local communities best interests in heart. Perhaps when the fed over-extends it's "god given' directive for subjugation, borders will become more malleable. Regional authority super-cedes national control. And local customs are the highest insurmountable vestiges our of true self rule. Organize and unionize! It's the democratic way.

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Credits ~~~
"Young Lincoln" Bronze by Charles Keck, Chicago
A speech in defense of the Illinois State Bank, 1837
Abie Baby / Fourscore from Hair musical soundtrack 1979

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Whoa Nellie. Just re-read this essay and couldn't quite wrap the brain around those last two paragraphs. Seems I was trying to give birth to some idea, but it didn't quite come out right. Oh, well. Sorry bout that. Will try better next time. Really!

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Lookout's picture

many myth's surround the man...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/02/17/AR201102...

Abe Lincoln’s actual record is fraught with breaches of civil liberties, defiance of the Constitution, a consolidation of executive power (by military force), establishing a massive powerful central government usurping Constitutional rights of the citizens, deceptive and tyrannical.

https://www.nordskogpublishing.com/the-myth-of-abe-lincoln-celebrate-geo...

We cling to stories as humans. Like the saying goes, "never let the truth get in the way of a good story." So the myth grows....bigger with each telling...until only a whisper of truth remains below the shouted myth.

Well I hope you all find a little truth in your day today. It is raining here again. Another inch predicted.

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“Until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

A much different picture of Lincoln arises. Funny how history is painted to favor certain interests. Truth is getting hard to find.

Hope you stay dry.

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Lookout's picture

@QMS

Perhaps that is why it is fabricated?

My false narrative is better than yours? And then off on another conflict we go. Gotta admit humans are a bizarre species.

Thanks for the OT...

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“Until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

haven't heard that song since forever. It takes me way back. Funny how a whole host of memories come back just with that song. It strikes me, that in that era, things were getting better. At least people were putting up a fight and there was an atmosphere of (at least a little bit) of solidarity. There was a feeling of us against them and that we were the good guys.
I can't remember if Hair was on stage before or after the 1968 Democratic convention where the counterculture was notified of what is acceptable by bashing in their heads. Or if the play came before the Black Panther apartment was raided and some of its occupants were murdered by the Chicago police. Or if the Chicago eight had gone on trial yet. Or if MLK had been murdered yet, or if Robert Kennedy had been murdered yet. Never mind, I guess things weren't getting better, I take it all back. I think what was happening is that the young people at least were awake.

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@randtntx
I remember that feeling too! Humanity was on an upswing. A new social consciousness dawning. Mass disruptions against the war establishment. Thought we were steering this planet in the right direction there for awhile. Can we get it back?

What happened? Took a lot of coercion to stop that movement, 'fer sure.

Saw Hair the play first in St. Pete around '75 or '76. Had the vinyl '72 or so. Cool stuff. Some things we don't forget.

Cheers

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@QMS in the late '60s in Chicago. It brings back a flood of memories. The mind is a funny fuzzy thing. That was a bad time for many people though it wasn't a bad time for me. I guess the saying "what goes round comes round' has an element of truth to it.

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Thanks QMS. Is QMS a TLA? I see it every day on our dawg walk now. Before the prison crew left, they dragged all the brush to an open area next to the path and now there is a big recycle container #31. I guess they are going to chip it up.
qms31.jpg

Couldn't take any more local news, meh. So I looked up the history of Mary Lincoln why not. oops
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Mary-Todd-Lincoln

Happy and energetic in her youth, she suffered subsequent ill health and personal tragedies and behaved erratically in her later years.
...
As the widow of an assassinated president—the first in the nation’s history—she received public sympathy, and in 1870 Congress responded by granting her an annual pension of $3,000, raising it to $5,000 in 1881. She considered the sum inadequate, however, and continued to believe that she was poor.

huh one of those days

To Mama From Christopher And The Old Man

eat the bear

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@eyo
Quality Management System as a moniker for some haulage company? Somehow can't connect it with Quicksilver Messenger Service Wink

Thanks for Mr. Stills!

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snoopydawg's picture

@eyo

Well according to the book, Abraham Lincoln vampire hunter. This is why if you dig up his grave you won't find his body there.

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Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.

@snoopydawg
If the story is made up anyway, make it a block buster!

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snoopydawg's picture

@QMS

Smile

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Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.

Six cents, I just looked it up for Abe Lincoln Day. unusual

One of the most unusual pennies produced by the United States Mint are the "1943 Silver Pennies." Most people believe that all pennies ever produced by the United States Mint are made of copper. Therefore, when someone finds one of these silver pennies in their pocket change, they believe they have come across a great rarity. Although they are uncommon, they are hardly rare.

The War Effort and Metals
The 1943 silver colored penny is a wartime coin issue made of steel and coated with zinc.

hardly rare

I ran a magnet through my weird change box and that was one of two things that stuck tuit. The other was a Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority token.

Features
Country * Tokens * (United States - Transit Tokens)
Type Token
Years 1976-
Weight 6.8 g
Diameter 26 mm
Thickness 1 mm
Shape Round
Orientation Medal alignment ↑↑
References AC# NY 630 AV, TC# 235888

No end date on the years up there, right on. I wonder if it's still acceptable, coins on the subway. ta

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TheOtherMaven's picture

@eyo

A few were minted (allegedly by accident), but overwhelmingly outnumbered by the steel ones. (There are also a number of counterfeits, made by electroplating steel pennies with copper or by altering the dates on 1945, 1948 or 1949 coppers.)

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There is no justice. There can be no peace.

magiamma's picture

Rain coming in buckets to the west coast soon...

One last artist for Black History Month - another mother of the Black Art movement in the US.

EJ Montgomery

One of the main people creating visibility for the Black artist in the Bay Area, California and across the US.

EJ Montgomery twin rivers.jpg

Curator, printmaker, and mixed media artist Evangeline "EJ" Montgomery was born on May 2, 1933, in New York. … She received her B.F.A. degree from the California College of Arts and Crafts (now California College of the Arts) in 1969 and she worked as an independent curator to museums, university galleries and art centers where she organized exhibits. In 1971, she served as the curator for the Rainbow Sign Gallery in Berkeley, California before becoming an exhibition specialist for the American Association for State and Local History in Nashville, Tennessee and coordinating eight national workshops on “Interpreting the Humanities through Museum Exhibits.” She also organized national exhibit workshops for the Association of African American Museums. In 1983, Montgomery began her career with the United States State Department as a program development officer for the Arts America Program

https://www.thehistorymakers.org/biography/evangeline-montgomery-40

EJ knows everyone, and they know her. She has been indefatigable in helping to develop a network of artists and scholars throughout the Diaspora. To show support for artists, it has not been uncommon for EJ to attend opening receptions at Stella Jones Gallery in New Orleans, the Museum of the National Center for Afro-American artists in Boston, or the Sherri Washington Gallery in Detroit, and when representing the Cultural Programs Office, U.S. State Department, she shows up at exhibition openings in Ecuador, Taiwan and Germany.
http://iraaa.museum.hamptonu.edu/page/The-Artist-Lovingly-Known-As-EJ

you have to click the link to get to the video. https://thmdaprodmedia.blob.core.windows.net/media/story/video/222335

E.J. (Evangeline) Montgomery, who had been active in the Los Angeles art networks in the 1950s and 1960s, moved to Oakland in 1965 and by 1967 had founded an African American artists' advocacy group called Art West Associated North (AWAN). Like other political organizations concerned with African American visibility and self-definition, the association protested the exclusion of African American artists from local museums and galleries.

https://oaklandlibrary.org/blogs/library-community/ej-evangeline-montgom...

EJ Montgomery print.jpg

here is a video clip of a discussion of black artist’s that participated in a show that EJ curated at the Oaland Museum. Again you have to click the link to get to the video.

https://diva.sfsu.edu/collections/sfbatv/bundles/230858
edit

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enhydra lutris's picture

fully awake yet. I, for one, got nuthin' to say about ol' Abe at this stage of the morning, maybe much later.

I never got on the Hair bandwagon, never saw of it, and found many of its lyrics annoying, but that was me. The "when?" of it popped up above, so, briefly:

After an off-Broadway debut on October 17, 1967, at Joseph Papp's Public Theater and a subsequent run at the Cheetah nightclub from December 1967 through January 1968, the show opened on Broadway in April 1968 and ran for 1,750 performances. - Wikipedia

As a thesis,

It seems like regional authority has the geographically local communities best interests in heart.

needs a lot of polishing up. It presumes that the governments or other authorities and controlling interests of those areas have the communities' best interests at heart. I find that to be highly questionable, and not only because of the South and Jim Crow, racism, segregation and all that.

We don't have a functioning democracy, and those in power do not appear to have the best interests of the people in mind or in heart. It is a bit tricky, but throughout our history, on pretty much all levels, the oligarchs, plutocrats, rentiers, speculators and corporates hit the ground running and got off to a good head start. That has enabled them to control and manipulate the economy, the political system, and, through the media, our thoughts, viewpoints and emotions.

There is a bizarre disconnect in that a nation which claims to be the pinnacle of "democracy" takes as implicit and determining the adherence to an economic system that is not only anti-democratic, but severely so.

There is a cultural and ideological conflict played out on this continent and in this nation as to who best can understand, see, and promote the maximum welfare of the people, who should chose, decide and plan. Is it the great unwashed, the poorly educated, unschooled and semi-impecunious masses? Is it instead a well-meaning aggregation of their more and better educated intellectual superiors? Does that second group, as there defined, even fucking exist? Question 3 is largely unaddressed. Mass popular culture is contemptuous of "eggheads", why is this so, who benefits and is it justifiable? Though this whole miasma is seldom forthrightly addressed, we can look around and see what we have, and who is in charge, and discern their goals and purposes as well as their massive failings. Technocrats and oligarchs have replaced priests and kings, well, not so much priests, but Diderot was still more or less on the money. A cheap shot empirical test is whether the "sagebrush rebellion" made things better or worse, and whether, if more successful and more fully implemented, would it be that much better or that much worse. I say worse on both counts.

It's Darwin Day.

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That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --

@enhydra lutris
As for polishing, it started with a thought about the 'civil' war. A regional organization (the confederate) leaving the northern region (the union). Then the train of thought ran down the valley of geographical and cultural differences. Was supposed to cross the bridge to future segmenting of the north American continent into manageable zones. Rather than one central nexus (DC). But somehow got lost in the verbiage woods. Envisioning again a southern region, with it's own culture and commerce, a hub in Atlanta. A northeastern section NYC based, midwestern with Chicago, Pacific zone, mountain section and plains. DC could still be it's own little fiefdom, but would lose power control over other regions. Texas will stay a republic. This could be the settlement of a modern civil war. Commerce can still cross pollinate, though terms are negotiated inter-regionally.

Subgroups would naturally evolve within each region, but the fracture of national control would encourage sub-regional treaties. That was where the thought train was headed, but getting from our perception of the last 'civil' war to the next one required a a bigger jump than expressed.

A penny for your thoughts.

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janis b's picture

It was nice to see a statue of young Abe. I looked for more young Abe images and found this one I quite like ...

I think it's the hair ; ).

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