The Aging of President Lincoln

I was searching for something to watch Saturday night.
My wife had a busy day and was asleep.
No Mets, no soccer, at that hour.
The great movie series “Reel 13” was taking one of its frequent vacations on PBS.
Wait, movies need vacations?
Instead, Channel 13 was showing a documentary about the Bee Gees. Just what I wanted, right?
I scrolled through the usual channels. On MSNBC – known to me as The Department of Wishful Thinking – Rachel was going on (and on) about some Republican predator.  Get me out of here.
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My search for something led me willy-nilly into the maze of Optimum channels, into the stations with numbers befitting defensive ends in American football. The 90s.
And there on Channel 97, The Movie Channel, was the wrinkled face of Daniel Day-Lewis, portraying the president in the Spielberg bio “Lincoln.” I had somehow never seen it before.
On the tv screen, the President was in conflict with his own party, including Tommy Lee Jones as Rep. Thaddeus Stevens, the fervent anti-slavery Republican, featured in the Doris Kearns Goodwin book, “Team of Rivals.”
Jones once portrayed that rascal Mooney Lynn in the movie, “Coal Miner’s Daughter.” Now he was playing a formidable goad to President Lincoln, who had war troubles, political troubles, family troubles.

Let me digress by saying that Lincoln and his wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, are familiar to me, from our two years living in Kentucky. I loved the countryside, where Lincoln lived as a child. Once, I spent hours in the Todd mansion in Lexington – a few steps from the University of Kentucky's Rupp Arena. basketball palace.
We still have a wonderful biography  – “Mary Todd Lincoln, Biography of a Marriage,” by Ruth Painter Randall, which tells how the Black caretaker, Mammy Sally, told the Todd girls a secret – that she marked the back door of the mansion, to alert runaway slaves that she would slip food to them as they headed north toward the Ohio River and freedom. I often think of the tangled childhood that formed the conflicted wife of a President.
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So there was the movie, Saturday night, as the House of Representatives dithered about backing Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. Made me think about the ship of fools, Republican version, these days. The movie also depicts Lincoln’s son, Robert-- forbidden from signing up as a soldier -- watching severed limbs of Union soldiers, being dumped into an open pit.

Those terrible times etched themselves on the angular face of Daniel Day-Lewis/Abraham Lincoln. In the movie, an aide tells Lincoln that he has aged 10 years in the past year, and the President nods knowingly. He feels the struggles in his bones, in the crevices on his face. When he is assassinated and dies on April 15, 1865, he is all of 56 years old.

Despite Lincoln’s own border-state conflicts, he has seen the Blacks “emancipated,” whatever that meant to anybody. Watching the movie on Saturday night, I was touched by the strange scenario: Republicans the good guys, voting for emancipation, and the Democrats, the bad guys, doing the dirty work for southern plantation owners.

How weird to see party names flipped -- in the age of MAGA/Fox/corrupt Supreme Court/ babbling religious zealots putting shackles on female Americans.

Sunday morning, I went out in the driveway and picked up the Daily Miracle (i.e., The NYT) and there was a column by Maureen Dowd, suggesting a State of the Union speech this Thursday for President Biden, age 81 – a full quarter century older than Abraham Lincoln was in 1865.

The Lincoln movie seems like grotesque real life – a battered president riding a horse through the killing fields of Virginia.
No Lincolns around here in 2024. But are Americans so addled they cannot tell the difference between an aging President and an aging scoundrel who has been a bad seed all his life?
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Maureen Dowd’s proposal for President Biden’s speech:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/02/opinion/joe-biden-state-of-the-union.html

NB: Here is a Youtube I just discovered this morning, a earnest-appearing look at part of the Lincoln movie that I missed Saturday night.