Lincoln remains as statuesque as ever.

AuthorGuelzo, Allen C.
PositionArt & History - Abraham Lincoln - Essay

HEROES HAVE become invisible, their virtues unexplainable in the language we now use to detail human actions. Great deeds somehow keep on being done, but we have lost a capacity to see them as great. Biographies grow to ever greater and greater lengths, while the subjects of them shrink into the shadows of the pedestrian, the ordinary, and the relentlessly disclosed secret. No history textbook today can pass muster unless it highlights the insignificant, reduces absolutes to local accident, and eliminates grand narratives in favor of a collection of tales, full of sound and fury, whose chief goal is to elicit pity, sympathy, or guilt.

The hero is the story, not just of a good deed, but a great deed--a great deed which climbs the unclimbable, endures the unendurable, holds fast to the lost, but who can be a hero when climbing is so routine that Mt. Everest has become littered with discarded bottles and cans? The dark side of our bottomless wealth and comfort is a cynicism which disarms any motivation for sacrifice, and a suspicion that, in a world of comforts, heroes only can be play-actors. Something other than the heroic must be motivating the heroes, we seem to reason, because there is so little need for heroism.

What we do in dedicating a statue of Abraham Lincoln flies so finely in the face of this age of postheroism that, somewhere, we can he sure some voice will fix on this event to tell us that this is all farce--that Lincoln cannot be a hero because he was a racist, or that he cannot be the savior of the Union because the Union was rotten to its exploitative, capitalist, warmongering, imperialist, Christ-loving, minority-massacring, little-Eichmann core and could not deserve a savior.

For six decades after his death, this was not so. Lincoln was the quintessential, the indispensable, American hero. Of the 600 or so statues dedicated to American presidents, fully one-third are of Abrabam Lincoln; one of them, Daniel Chester French's seated Lincoln in the Lincoln Memorial, may be the most famous American statue ever created. However, the post-World War I cultural malaise, which inaugurated an era of literary debunking and political minimalism, curved the arc of other Lincoln statuary downwards, away from the wise, heroic statesman and in the direction of a more folksy, proletarian Lincoln. Even in Lincoln's Illinois, statuary of Lincoln continues to bring him off pedestals, closer to the earth, sitting on park benches, in the fashion...

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