I let a day and a half go without posting despiting having a great many morsels to feast upon. I plead family.
Claudia and I made good time back from Mackinac. We stopped for lunch at a Big Boy in Ishpeming Michigan. We listened to the NPR news for the first time in three days. I drove to the Big Boy from St. Ignace where our ferry landed. It was my only driving of the trip. I read Anne Frank’s diary to within a few months of its end. We’re in no hurry to end it and my next reading will surely conclude it.
We did a lot of reading on the island. I finished two chapters of my Lincoln bio. Lincoln the man without a party or a future is taking the writing craft that he deems so important and gradually imposing himself on the nation’s conscience by exposing the weaknesses in the platform of the man everyone expects to be the next President of the United States. I’ve been struck for years how unlike the Republican Party of today the GOP of Lincoln’s day was. Today’s GOP and its preoccupation with state’s rights comes right out of the playbook of the Jacksonian democrats of Lincoln’s day. The Democrat’s opposition to government investment in roads and industry is today’s Republican cry not the cry of Lincoln and his fellow whigs who made themselves into Republicans. It is also striking to me how Lincoln was cast adrift like I have been. In his case his party, the whigs, dissolved. In my case the GOP has purged itself of folks like me almost as a homage to Joseph Stalin. I prefer the Democratic party to the Gulag. And I’m more apt to hear Lincoln’s name at a Democratic conclave than a GOP meeting.
We had company as soon as we were home in Duluth and I just didn’t get around to entering blog posts. Most of the ones I will write next come from the news. Dr. Dixon just keeps cranking out more and more good news as though the news were so many little crosses and I was Count Dracula. Maybe he imagines that a spate of good news from the school district will make primary voters sit up and tell themselves, “thank goodness we were cheated. Everything is working out so wonderfully. I guess we better go out and not vote for Harry Welty.”
Maybe it will work. Maybe it won’t.
