The Chariot of Desire: Part IV

October 21, 2017

In Ken Burns’ Civil War, writer Shelby Foote (edit: yeah, that guy) says this of Abraham Lincoln:

The curious thing about Lincoln to me is that he could remove himself from himself, as if he were looking at himself. It’s a very strange, very eerie thing and highly intelligent. Such a simple thing to say, but Lincoln’s been so smothered with stories of his compassion that people forget what a highly intelligent man he was, and almost everything he did–almost everything he did was calculated for effect.

That’s a thought I carried with me throughout my solo tour of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Museum in Springfield, Ill. There’s no getting beyond the “smothered” reverence implicit in an interactive, theatrical, multimedia tour of one man’s entire life. But to be fair, the museum works hard to go beyond hero worship. (That role is reserved for the gift shop.) Visitors are routed through entire sections devoted Lincoln’s contemporaneous critics, such as a gallery of negative political cartoons and a dark, spooky hall of mirrors wherein recorded actors assail Lincoln’s handling of the Civil War. Efforts are also made to humanize Lincoln with elaborate dioramas depicting his childhood and private life. In other words, almost everything was calculated for effect.

For me, the museum is an embarrassingly intimate jaunt through the life of a real man who still feels alive to me. As soon as I enter the tour through the life-size facsimile of Lincoln’s boyhood log cabin, I can’t dismiss the impulse to explore the museum with Abe himself. For a man who once said of his own campaign autobiography, “There is not much of it, for the reason, I suppose, that there is not much of me,” I want so badly to see the incredulous look on that man’s face when he comes into view of full-scale wax figures in the likeness of him, his family, his friends, and his murderer.

To achieve this wish with albeit diminished results, I imagine that Lincoln’s life was mine, and that the museum is dedicated to studying me. For example, instead of starting at a log cabin with young Abe teaching himself to read by the fireplace, the exhibit shows me in my childhood home parked in front of a TV watching The Bozo Show while I smash homemade waffles into my mouth. (Speaking as a firsthand source, that would qualify as an authentic scene in my upbringing.) Then I imagine the museum curators’ painstaking attempt to portray my banal childhood of buttered waffles and morning clown shows as the first stop in a majestic, inspiring journey of hardship and triumph. In that manner, I can take a guess at how Lincoln might feel about his own museum. Even so, my empathic comparison can only go so far—e.g. I’ve never been the president of a country before.

I want to know what would amuse, baffle, horrify, and shame Lincoln about the way we see him today. From what I’ve yet gathered about his true persona, Lincoln seems very much like a human person to me. A witty person, maybe even a humble person, and certainly a flawed person. But there’s this unreachable well of magic within him, too, and I can’t tell if it’s projected or genuine. Foote’s observation walks the edge of that bottomless chasm: how does a human person, time and again and without breaking down, remove himself from himself to make himself better? It’s that part of Lincoln that keeps him alive to me, not only because his “calculated” talent for harnessing his human touches to grand effect is a stimulating subject of study, but also because there’s immense value in that talent if it can be learned.

I want to learn that talent. I want to be the Book Cliffs.