Hanging in Andrew Breitbart’s living room is an eight-foot-tall portrait of Abraham Lincoln. The president’s visage — an expressionistic swirl of broad brushstrokes and bright colors — earns the admiration of everyone who sees it, Breitbart notes on the back cover of Ronald Reagan and the American Ideal, a book of paintings by the portrait’s artist, Steve Penley. Yet the muckraker saves his highest compliment for the painter himself. “Penley is one of those patriots who is heeding his country’s call,” Breitbart writes — the call to defend American exceptionalism.

It’s a weighty charge for the 47-year-old artist from Carrollton, Ga. A husband and father of three children, Penley hasn’t always painted with such purpose. These days, however, he produces hundreds of portraits of his favorite historical figures, such as Ronald Reagan and the Founders, to inspire patriotism in his fellow countrymen. “I just love my country,” he tells National Review Online.

Penley started doodling cowboys and Indians while growing up in Macon, Ga., and he continued his artistic diversions through high school. When he enrolled at the University of Georgia, however, he soon realized he “had no other marketable skills,” so he majored in art.

Penley, preppy and unjaded in his khakis and penny loafers, didn’t look the part of a tortured artist. “I remember the first day I walked into art class,” he reminisces. “Everyone stopped and got quiet. It was like an E. F. Hutton commercial.” And then he saw what his classmates were working on. “Their paintings were dark and brown and black and cynical,” he says.

Read the full article here.

After collaborating with gay associates for almost thirty years, I’ve reached the conclusion that most gay men hold a fundamentally center/right view on most economic and national security issues.  The over-riding feeling expressed to me from my gay friends is the deeply held desire to be left alone.  And after watching GOProud Chairman Christopher Barron take this obnoxious attack from non-entity Cenk Uyger for having the temerity to identify himself as a conservative, I’ve reached the greater conclusion that the conservative movement needs articulate and courageous voices like this as part of our team.

As Mr. Barron puts it: “I have an easier time being openly gay with conservatives than I do being a conservative with other gay people.”  So, if CPAC and the Republican Party can be accepting of gay conservatives who don’t hold exactly to every single position espoused by the party, why can’t Broadway do the same?

The chill wind of intolerance was most evident when the Broadway community “outed” Sacremento Music Theatre executive Scott Eckern as a financial supporter of California’s Proposition 8 campaign which defined marriage in the state as being between one man and one woman (you know, the definition we’ve lived with for thousands of years). Unlike Mr. Barron who does not equate opposition to same-sex marriage with bigotry, the tolerant voices of Broadway sang out at fortissimo against the shocking and intolerable position that Eckern shared with the majority of Americans, including President Obama.

Eckern, classy and dignified, stepped down from his position so as to save his board the difficult task of dealing with the controversy, and the authoritarian leftists who populate Broadway choruses, wardrobe departments and front offices had a very, high-profile scalp for their efforts.  And, the clear message was sent to anyone else in the industry who might dare to think that marriage should stay defined as being between a man and a woman: Keep your bigoted mouth shut.

In response to the Prop 8 victory, Broadway composer Marc Shaiman put together this video mocking religion and characterizing Prop. 8 supporters as stupid and hypocritical while depicting supporters as intelligent, cool and enlightened:

The sketch was also performed live at a fundraiser supporting same-sex marriage efforts called “Defying Inequality” that raised $400,000 for gay rights groups.

The strict adherence to the gay left dogma can be seen in the product put forth on Broadway’s stages as well. Last year’s “Next Fall” about a gay couple comprised of a Christian and an atheist portrayed Christian Southerners as backward, hypocritical dolts while the atheist, liberal New Yorker is enlightened and full of wit.  It was produced by no less than Elton John and it received nearly unanimous raves from New York’s liberal theatre critics.  Of course, “Next Fall” was rewarded with a Tony nomination for Best Play.  The Broadway audience was not as kind to “Next Fall” and it closed after only 132 performances.

Meanwhile, one is hard pressed to find any play on Broadway in the past two decades that deals with any contrary viewpoint of left-wing gay politics with anything but derision. Characters expressing any opposing position are depicted as stupid at best, evil at worst. From Tony Kushner to Terrance McNally to Eve Ensler, playwrights who promote the extreme gay political position are celebrated, even when their behavior is repulsive (like when Ensler asked a six-year-old girl what her vagina smelled like as part of her “research” for 10th anniversary edition of “The Vagina Monologues”). The closest thing one can find to a gay-themed play that features a Republican in a positive role is an Off-Broadway disaster called “Abraham Lincoln’s Big, Gay Dance Party” which “celebrates” the founder of the GOP as a bisexual.

The intolerance also affects the performers on Broadway. The “tolerant” left went crazy when Broadway diva Kristin Chenoweth appeared on the 700 Club to promote her album of Christian music.  Of course, Ms. Chenoweth has been nothing but supportive of the gay community and has spent exhaustive amounts of volunteer time on behalf of AIDS charities, but the fact that she would even appear on the “hate-filled” 700 Club inspired a “Boycott Kristin Chenoweth” movement that actually caused a bit of damage to her stellar reputation.  Ms. Chenoweth had to bend over backwards to accommodate the intolerant and close-minded gay-left who couldn’t see fit to allow her to promote her album to people who might not share their views.

So, as the Republican Party embarks on this very healthy and invigorating internal discussion over the inclusion of gay republicans who agree with so much of our political agenda, I yearn for a day when such an open and frank discussion could be had within the theatrical community populated by folks who pretend to be the most open-minded artists in the world but actually resemble the city council in “Footloose”.

Until Broadway opens its mind and starts including a diversity of opinion amongst its artistic ranks, how can true creativity thrive?

Agee, afire with a sense of purpose and mission, sought to arrest that forgetfulness with his essay. An early film critic and soon-to-be screenwriter (his work in Hollywood would later include the scripts for The African Queen and The Night of the Hunter), he was, in the words of a friend, “a big, untidy man who frequently looked like a tramp and who cared not a bit for material things. . . Agee was extremely fastidious about many things — about people, about humanity, about music, movies and, above all, about writing. In his years as a critic, he anguished over books and films that less patient critics would write off as trash: somewhere, Agee felt, there had to be something worth praising.”

A thrice-married, hard-drinking insomniac with the tender heart of a poet, Agee began his now-classic treatise with a description of the type and quality of laughter that America had lost with the death of silent movies:

In the language of screen comedians four of the main grades of laugh are the titter, the yowl, the bellylaugh and the boffo. The titter is just a titter. The yowl is a runaway titter. Anyone who has ever had the pleasure knows all about a bellylaugh. The boffo is the laugh that kills. An ideally good gag, perfectly constructed and played, would bring the victim up this ladder of laughs by cruelly controlled degrees to the top rung, and would then proceed to wobble, shake, wave and brandish the ladder until he groaned for mercy. . .

The reader can get a fair enough idea of the current state of screen comedy by asking himself how long it has been since he has had that treatment. . . The laughs today are pitifully few, far between, shallow, quiet and short. They almost never build, as they used to, into something combining the jabbering frequency of a machine gun with the delirious momentum of a roller coaster.

In Agee’s view, those meticulously crafted and constructed laugh fests of yore — inspiring in audiences what he described as the “laughter of unrespectable people having a hell of a fine time, laughter as violent and steady and deafening as standing under a waterfall” — had given way to cheap isolated one-liners strung together with little thought to momentum, timing, and nuance. As a reminder of what he was describing, he profiled a rich selection of the era’s shining lights, from Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd and Harry Langdon to Mack Sennett and his Keystone Cops.

Saving one of his favorites for last, his essay ends with a look at the man who “never smiled,” a comedian with a face “as still and sad as a daguerreotype” that “ranked almost with Lincoln’s as an early American archetype; it was haunting, handsome, almost beautiful.” The man, of course, was Buster Keaton, and Agee credited the bearer of “The Great Stone Face” with “some of the most preposterously ingenious and visually satisfying physical comedy ever invented.”

The response to Agee’s effusions was rapturous. “The best thing I’ve ever read on the best thing ever done in films,” one reader wrote. “A masterpiece of perspicacity and lucidity,” intoned another, “done with a precision, an incisiveness — and withal a reverent tenderness — I have not seen equaled.” In the coming years, “Comedy’s Greatest Era” was quoted far and wide as America woke up to their lost heritage. Retrospectives became well-attended. Old funnymen still living gained new fans in their dotage via live appearances on that new medium hungry for content, television. Universities, museums, historians, and private collectors went on a quest to preserve as many moldering nitrate film reels as they could. And, bit-by-bit, much of the best of our silent comedies was saved from oblivion. James Agee’s drinking, smoking, and long nights spent agonizing over his writing eventually caught up to him, with a series of heart attacks striking like so many titters and yowls until the fatal one — a real boffo, one might say — felled him in 1955. But he lived long enough to see what an effect his heartfelt essay had on a previously somnolent movie-going populace (and ultimately became one of America’s most revered writers, with a posthumously published novel winning the Pulitzer Prize, and a large selection of his work being immortalized in The Library of America).

One particular treasure, however, looked lost forever: Buster Keaton’s last true silent film, The Cameraman (1928). With prints of two of his other filmic triumphs — The Navigator (1924) and The General (1926) — in increasing circulation among film fans and scholars throughout the 1950s, scholars went hungrily looking for his other pictures. The Cameraman was the first Keaton picture made at M-G-M after a long stint working independently, so it was assumed that the great studio would have an archival screening print on file.

And yet, when one of Keaton’s friends went to ask for a copy, he was told that their house print had deteriorated into oblivion, not from neglect but from over-projection. Apparently, studio heads throughout the 1930s and ’40s had deemed The Cameraman a perfect example of cinematic humor on screen, and ordered every comedian on contract to view it before embarking on their own careers. The movie was screened hundreds of times by the likes of The Marx Brothers, The Three Stooges, Abbott and Costello, Laurel and Hardy, W. C. Fields, Lucille Ball, Jimmy Durante, Bert Lahr, Zasu Pitts, Cary Grant, and Red Skelton until it was left in useless tatters.

(The original negative, squirreled away in the depths of the M-G-M vault out of reach of ordinary fans on the street, was later lost in a devastating 1965 fire, and looking far and wide across the world failed to turn up a decent print. It took the fortunate discovery and assembling of several copies found between the late 1960s and 1990s to create the fairly high-quality version on DVD that we enjoy today.)

When fans, spurred on in their quest by James Agee’s writing, finally got a hold of The Cameraman, what did they find? If the long-dead writer were still here with us, he might answer “titters, yowls, bellylaughs, and more than a few killer boffos.” (not to mention a preternaturally talented monkey whose hilarious hijinks put the Nazi-saluting simian from Raiders of the Lost Ark to shame.) Poised as it is at the tail end of Keaton’s prime years, and filmed mere months before sound rendered the great silent comedians, in Agee’s words, “as badly off as fine dancers suddenly required to appear in plays,” the picture represents an elegant summation of what he reverently calls the Silent Era’s “beauties of comic motion which are hopelessly beyond reach of words.”

Yet as hopeless as the effort may be, we shall attempt in the coming weeks — as Agee himself did — to use mere words to bring the visual comedic delights of both The Cameraman and its maker to life again for modern Conservative Movie Lovers.

FURTHER READING and VIEWING

Read James Agee’s essay “Comedy’s Greatest Era.” Luckily for Conservative Movie Lovers, back issues of Life magazine have been archived and made available for free at Google Books. Head on over and peruse the September 5, 1949 edition containing Agee’s most famous essay. Also take some time to check out the wonderful ads — here is one of my faves:

“…Particularly as African-Americans, I feel we are in no real position to idealize the American experience and get too choked up about institutions and symbols that were not created with us in mind. Certainly, we cannot cast our lot with those who are actively seeking to destroy those gains we have made.”

I have a number of issues with the above statement, not the least of which is that the principles that inspired the American founding were always viewed as universal principles, which applied to all of mankind. Curiously, it wasn’t until the introduction of Historicist and Darwinian philosophy (which gave birth to Progressivism) that some Americans began to argue otherwise. And of course, I disagree that conservatives are actively seeking to destroy all of the gains black America has made.

It is important to note that the sentiments that my friend expresses are similar to the political attitudes which continue to permeate much of the black community. These same attitudes are also particularly present in the thinking of the black leftists, who have long held the conviction that the existence of slavery at our nation’s founding renders our Constitution a hollow document; the institutions and symbols that sprang from the founding were bereft of moral authority; the founders were hypocrites and liars, and the American dream is little more than a cruel myth.

From this conviction a kind of “cultural revolutionary defiance” has arisen, that is to say: black authenticity began to be increasingly measured by the degree to which black people defined themselves by way of their ethnicity, expressed anger at historical injuries, and were critical of, or rejected American symbols and institutions.

In this respect, my friend is a true new-revolutionary. But the issue he raises is not a new one, neither is it exclusive to American blacks.

In July of 1858, Abraham Lincoln addressed the question of how almost half of the citizens of this country could take pride and ownership in the accomplishments of the nation when they were not “historically related” to the founders, or those living on these shores at the time of the founding. Lincoln answered: “If they look back through this history to trace their connection with those days by blood, they find they have none, they cannot carry themselves back into that glorious epoch and make themselves feel that they are part of us, but when they look through that old Declaration of Independence they find that those old men say that ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,’ and then they feel that that moral sentiment taught in that day evidences their relation to those men, that it is the father of all moral principle in them, and that they have a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote that Declaration, and so they are. That is the electric cord in that Declaration that links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together–that will link those patriotic hearts as long as the love of freedom exists in the minds of men throughout the world.”

The essential element that my friend and the black leftists have missed is that what binds us together as Americans is not shared blood, race, ethnicity, or tribe; it is the unshakable belief in certain universal principles. The American experience is not attached to men who were flawed, but is instead fixed to ideas that remain flawless. The institutions and symbols of America are reflective of the revolutionary idea that all men are the property of God, created with an equal right to life, liberty, private property, and the free pursuit of bettering their station in life. Martin Luther King, Jr., put it more succinctly: “The American dream reminds us…that every man is an heir of the legacy of dignity and worth.”

All of us, whether our ancestors arrived through the gates of Ellis Island or survived travel through the Middle Passage are heirs to that grand idea. It is this idea that animates true conservatism and moreover, it is ONLY that idea—those principles—that made possible the huge gains that black Americans have made in this country and indeed in the world. It is, perhaps, also the reason that more Africans have freely chosen to come to America than were ever imported in slave ships.

In response to my friend, all Americans should ask: If not America, where? If not American symbols, which symbols? If not American institutions, which institutions will do? If not the principles of the American founding, upon which principles do the black left propose to build a new America—an America they can “idolize” and “get choked up about”?

Ask Van Jones.

These forward-thinking paragons, nursed on the mother’s-milk of Marx and Mao, would build their new America on the bedrock of economic redistribution and racial favoritism. I believe we tried that once in this country…

Marlin, a clownfish, starts off promising his wife, Coral, the whole ocean:

Marlin: So, Coral, when you said you wanted an ocean view, you didn’t think you were going to get the whole ocean, did you? Huh?
Marlin: Oh, yeah. A fish can breathe out here. Did your man deliver, or did he deliver?
Coral: My man delivered.
Marlin: And it wasn’t so easy.
Coral: Because a lot of other clownfish had their eyes on this place.

Like many couples in love, they name their future children, without considering that life sometimes has other plans. Pixar treats these middle class dreams seriously, though, and that’s what makes the next scene all the more tragic. The very dream of giving his future children the gift of an inexhaustible horizon cuts short Coral’s life and that of most of his children when a barracuda eats them.

Marlin, knocked out by the barracuda, is powerless to save his family. He finds just one egg and promises the impossible: “I promise I will never let anything happen to you.”

The problem, though, is that children were meant to do things. They were meant to go to school and to become full members of the community. 

Promising that nothing will happen means that everything is a potential enemy – and that, at least, is exactly where Marlin finds himself. Compounding his neurosis is that his son, Nemo, was born with a “bad flipper” that makes swimming tough. The ocean, as our world, is constantly in flux – and dangerous. Andrew Stanton put it best in an interview with National Geographic: “I know it’s precarious out there.”

And precarious it is! Nemo, as Icarus didn’t heed Daedalus’s calls, journeys out to that very ocean toward a boat – and winds up in an aquarium in an Australian dentist’s office, miles from home and Marlin, of course, resolves to find him before he goes once and for all, off to the dentist’s niece, never to be heard from again.

For conservatives, again, we find that Pixar shares our values, even if it isn’t as full-throated as we would like. Indeed, its quiet articulation is the best kind of sedition.

There’s the love of a father. In an era in which paternal rights are akin to hate speech and when “choice mom” has entered the lexicon, the idea that a single father would travel 20,000 leagues to rescue his son might seem alien. Mothers, we know from nature, will die for their cubs. (Witness the rise of Palin’s Momma grizzlies.) But fathers trying to help their children? How retrograde in our era of no-fault divorces, how insulting. How. Dare. Pixar!

There’s the love of sacrifice, best exemplified by the kind of Great Escape ethos permeating the aquarium. Gill, voiced by the magnificent Willem DaFoe, gives up his chance at rescue by helping Nemo reunite with his father. 

Finally, there’s the perseverance. Nemo works to save himself by clogging up the filter with a pebble. He’s nobody’s cripple. His weak fin, though an obstacle, doesn’t stop him from living the good life. The fish of the aquarium tank expect the best of him. There’s no ADA condescension in the fish tank. Meanwhile, Marlin, battles jellyfish, sharks, and whales to see his son again. The love a father knows for his son keeps him going, even when all seems lost.

Abraham Lincoln once said:

It is said an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence, to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him the words: “And this, too, shall pass away.” How much it expresses! How chastening in the hour of pride! How consoling in the depths of affliction!

Finding Nemo said it simpler. “Just keep swimming.”

CHAPTER ONE

Saturday, February 23, 1861

When Lorenzo Smith heard the chugging of the train, he felt for the revolver at his side. His fingers met its smooth handle, hidden beneath his black coat. Then he found the short barrel and the trigger below. Smith had reached for it a dozen times in the last hour, but he wanted to be certain that the gun was still there. It will make me a hero, he thought. It will change history.

Listening for the rumble of the train had been difficult. A loud mass of people waited for its arrival at Calvert Street Station. Smith did not know how many were there, but they must have numbered in the thousands. The noisy throng spilled from the open-ended depot onto Calvert and Franklin Streets. Inside the station, where Smith stood, shouts bounced off the walls and ceiling. This place of tearful departures and happy reunions had become a hotbed of agitation.

The train’s steam whistle pierced the din of the crowd. The engine would pull into Baltimore on schedule, at half past noon. Heads bobbed for a view. Smith struggled to keep his position near the track. He had picked it two hours earlier, when the flood of people was just a trickle. He was not sure precisely where the train would stop, but he thought he had made a good guess about where the last car might come to a halt. He wanted to be within striking distance.

As the locomotive’s big chimney came into view, a man standing next to Smith bellowed, “Here he comes! Here comes the Black Republican!” A roar of jeers and insults filled the station. Smith craned his neck. He saw the engine’s massive oil lamp mounted on top of the smoke box. It gazed forward like the unblinking eye of a mechanical Cyclops. Behind it were the cab, the coal tender, and a line of cars. Flags and streamers covered them all. The whole train glistened from a recent cleaning. At the rear, Smith spotted a car painted in orange and black. He reached into his coat another time and tapped the gun. Just making sure.

For the last ten days, the train carrying Abraham Lincoln on his inaugural journey from Springfield, Illinois, to Washington, D.C., had taken the president-elect through six northern states–all populated by the abolitionists who had voted him into office. Applause greeted him at almost every stop. But on this morning, as Lincoln’s train turned south into Maryland, it had entered slaveholding territory for the first time. Baltimore was the only city on the trip that had not extended a formal welcome to the incoming president–an obvious snub that pleased Smith when he thought of it.

Smith scanned the crowd and saw several men wearing hats with blue-ribbon cockades. This was the fashion among Baltimore’s secessionist set. Each cockade had a button in its center displaying the palmetto tree, the symbol of South Carolina. That state had quit the Union in December, before any of the others. Many Marylanders now wanted to join the growing Confederacy. The moment Lincoln pulled into the depot, the members of the mob would let him know that he did not have their support. They did not even respect him. In fact, they hated him.

Rumors had circulated for weeks that Lincoln would not be safe when he reached Baltimore. But the president-elect had no choice about the visit. The only rail route into Washington from the north required going through Baltimore. Lincoln had to stop and switch to the Baltimore & Ohio Rail Road line at another station more than a mile away. That meant the presidential party would have to make a slow transit from one depot to the other, surrounded the whole way by an angry swarm. Lincoln was supposed to catch a three o’clock departure for Washington, where he would arrive about an hour and a half later.

Smith could not keep from grinning. He could hardly have asked for a better opportunity than the one handed to him here and now. He was about to become a hero–the hero of a new nation. He had planned for this moment from the day he heard Lincoln would pass through his city. He had visited the depot to see where the trains stopped along the platform. He had walked the route Lincoln would take to the other rail line, checking alleys and side streets for the best escape routes. He had studied a picture of Lincoln that had appeared in a magazine. When he learned that the president-elect had grown a beard, he drew whiskers on the picture and studied it more. Smith had cleaned his revolver over and over, trying to keep it in perfect condition. He had tried on his entire wardrobe, testing the gun in trouser pockets, through belts, and in his coat. He bought himself a new pair of shoes and broke them in.

They felt good on his feet as Lincoln’s train crawled into the station. The shouting grew louder and louder. The engine rolled past Smith slowly, from right to left. His eyes met the conductor’s for a moment. The man was shaking his head from side to side. Smith wondered what it meant, but not for long–there was too much going on. The cars kept moving by him. The presidential car in back crept closer. He could see the silhouettes of a few heads through its windows. A fellow up the platform from Smith began to smack the car’s exterior with his cane, but it rolled out of his reach a moment later.

Then the train hissed to a halt, with the presidential car directly in front of Smith. His meticulous planning had paid off. Smith jumped onto the car’s metal steps. His feet clanged against them as he thrust himself forward and up. He heard men rushing behind him. At the door into Lincoln’s car, Smith hesitated. He quickly surveyed the depot from this elevated position. It was so full of people that Smith was not sure how he or anybody else could make a hasty exit. He would have to slip into the crowd and count on its anonymity to envelop him.

First things first, he reminded himself. Several other men stood beside him on the back of the car. Smith thought he recognized one of them from a secessionist meeting he had attended. His hand was hidden inside his coat. Smith saw a slight bulge. So at least two of us are ready to perform the job today, he thought. Then Smith reached into his own coat and clutched his revolver. He was about to pull it out when the door flew open.

“Stop right there!”

The shout came from within the car. Before Smith could comprehend it, he saw the end of a pistol pointing at his face, just inches away. Behind the weapon he met the gaze of a man who looked ready to pull the trigger.

“Raise your hands!”

Smith knew that before he could even lift his gun, he would be shot between the eyes. But he did not loosen his grip. He was too close to his goal.

“Where’s Lincoln?” yelled Smith.

“Raise your hands, sir, or I will shoot!” came the reply. The man leaned forward. His pistol almost touched Smith’s forehead.

Suddenly Smith felt a commotion in the depot. He sensed that the men backing him up were pulling away. The tone of the mob’s shouting had changed, too. He could not hear exactly what they were saying.

“One last time, sir: Raise your hands!”

Smith released the revolver. It slid back into his pocket. He showed his hands.

“Lincoln is not on this train,” said the man. “You won’t find him in Baltimore today.”

Smith peered over the man’s shoulders, into the rest of the car. It looked like a room in the mansion of a wealthy family. The red walls and heavy furniture bore all the dainty trappings of Victorian elegance. Blue silk covered the space between the windows. Little tassels dangled from the chairs and shined in the light of the open door. As Smith peered inside, he realized the man with the gun was actually letting him study the car’s interior. He wanted Smith to see who was aboard–and who was not.

Toward the rear, Smith noticed a plump, round-faced woman with her arms wrapped around a couple of frightened girls. A hulking man stood beside her, his arm on the back of her seat. A couple of boys sat nearby. Smith was certain he had seen the woman before. She glared back at him, her eyes glowing with anger. Then Smith realized who she was. He had seen her photograph. It was Mary Todd Lincoln, wife of the president-elect. He spent another few seconds looking at the other faces. Mrs. Lincoln’s husband was definitely not aboard.

The man with the gun spoke again: “There’s your proof. He’s not here. Now leave this train immediately!”

Smith studied the man. He was in his early twenties. Except for a thin mustache, his face was clean-shaven. His features were soft. He did not look like the sort of fellow who would pack a gun and protect a dignitary, but there was a steady determination in his gaze. Smith had no doubt the young man was willing to pull the trigger.

Smith still did not move. “Who are you?” he asked meekly.

“I am John Hay, secretary to Abraham Lincoln, who at this very moment is relaxing in Washington. He passed through Baltimore early this morning, in darkness. Now back off or I will shoot!”

Smith retreated a step. The door slammed shut. Smith realized that he now stood on the back of the car with a single companion, the man he had recognized. The others who had followed him up the steps were gone. He looked at the mass of people surrounding the train. He heard voices up the track: “Lincoln is not on the train! He’s not on board!” Someone at the front of the car must have delivered the message, which spread quickly through the crowd.

Dozens of faces now turned to Smith, hoping he would contradict this report. But they saw a demoralized man. “It’s true,” he said. “Lincoln is not here.”

The catcalls started again. “Lincoln is a coward!” “He’s a sneak!” “He’s lucky he’s not here!”

Smith slumped his shoulders and looked at the man beside him.

“We have failed,” he said.

Then Smith stepped off the train and vanished into the mob. On the way out, he did not touch his gun.

CHAPTER TWO

Monday, February 25, 1861

Langston Bennett threw down his copy of the Charleston Mercury. The pages fluttered to the floor as Bennett balled his hands into fists. “Damn him!” he said, sharply but to himself. His anger crested and began to subside. Bennett could almost feel it flow from his body. That was how it always happened–a moment of lost control, followed by a quick return to his senses. He let out a sigh, leaned back in his chair, and closed his eyes. He ran his fingers through the long gray hair that touched the collar of his shirt. “Something must be done,” he said in a low voice.

He opened a drawer in his desk and pulled out a blank sheet of paper. Instead of writing, he arched his back and gazed out the window in front of him, through the trees in Battery Park and across the harbor. He could see a couple of ships on the water. Further to his left, at the harbor’s mouth more than two miles away, he spied a tiny flag flapping above the waves. His eyes narrowed and returned to the page on his desk. He dipped his pen in a small bottle and rattled it around. When he brought it to the top of the page, the pen made a short black mark and ran dry. Now Bennett frowned. He could not even write the first letter of the date. He put the pen down, reached for a bell on his desk, and rang it loudly…

The First Assassin is a historical thriller set primarily in Washington, D.C., at the start of the Civil War. Bestselling author Vince Flynn blurbs it on the front cover: “An excellent book–it’s like The Day of the Jackal set in 1861 Washington.”

The Day of the Jackal is a twofer: Both the book (by Frederick Forsyth) and the movie (the 1973 version) are excellent. But the book is still better. It’s super excellent.

Anyway, I started working on The First Assassin in 1996–more than 13 years ago. Yeah, that’s a long time. It was the project I kept setting aside when something more pressing came along, such as the birth of a child or a writing deadline that came with a guaranteed paycheck.

There were other challenges as well. I knew how I wanted the story to start and finish. Inventing the plot that would connect the opening pages to the conclusion was a different matter. One time, I wrote down every scene on an index card and spread them across a big table. I moved scenes around and invented new ones, trying to make chapters flow and events unfold in a logical and compelling progression.

Another time, I wanted to jump start my creative process. So I resorted to a trick that one of my English professors used in college when she hoped to spark a classroom discussion about an 18th-century play: What actors do you imagine on stage, performing these roles?

I went through my manuscript and tried to associate several of its main characters with well-known actors. Then I pinned their pictures on a corkboard next to my desk. For the mysterious hitman who stalks President Lincoln, I naturally thought of Edward Fox, the star of The Day of the Jackal. But I wanted someone less debonair. So I settled on Viggo Mortensen. Other actors with pictures on the corkboard included Halle Berry, Nell Carter, and Morgan Freeman. My wife would joke about the Halle Berry picture. Thank goodness she’s not a jealous person.

The First Assassin also has a femme fatale, though I never thought of an actress who seemed like a perfect fit for my character. I may have discovered one recently: Polly Walker, who played Atia of the Julii in “Rome,” the HBO series.

I also tacked up photos of historical figures with parts in The First Assassin: Lincoln, Gen. Winfield Scott, and Secretary of State William Seward. For the central hero, Col. Charles Rook, I used the picture of an actual Union officer, Charles Pomeroy Stone. Over time, however, I came to think of Rook as a good role for Tom Selleck. I’ve always liked Tom Selleck.

Did this technique work? Well, it didn’t exactly fail. Honesty forces me to report that it didn’t drive me toward completion as quickly as I had once hoped. It did influence the way I wrote, however. In that sense, it shaped the book.

Now I just need for someone to turn The First Assassin into a movie. The film rights are available. Does anybody know if Tom Selleck is looking for a project?

I don’t agree, and I think it matters that I be right and they be wrong.

It matters because in a world where the power of images and ideas is becoming stronger every day – where people defend themselves against men with guns by using cellphone cameras – we seem to be fresh out of ideas.

There’s a physical war going on out in the world with us on one side – and on the other a group allied in large part by their rejection of our beliefs as much as their rejection of our power. They are fighting us with bullets and bombs – and with YouTube videos, discussion forums, and impassioned manifestos. They believe, alright. If you ask them, they will clearly tell you that they do and tell you in what.

So as a counterbalance, what do we believe in? On this 4th of July, it’s worth asking – is it just baseball, hot dogs, and light beer?

It’s not, you say – it’s much more than our prosperity – it’s…our freedom. It’s…and then the words run out. Why can’t we say it? Why is it that the people who shape our culture can’t talk about whatever it is that culture is defined by, and instead talk endlessly and with pleasure about those whose only joy is transgressing the culture they can’t express?

Expressing our culture matters. Look, at the end of the day, this war won’t just be won killing those who would kill us. It will be won by converting those who would join them to join us instead. But what do we offer to make it worth joining us, exactly? What makes our side worth joining? Who are we, and what are we trying to do in the world? Why can’t we talk about that?

That’s not a new question. I read a lot – my wife would roll her eyes and say “only a lot?” – and in the course of reading, I tripped over an interesting and little-known book…a political think piece commissioned by Time Magazine founder Henry Luce in 1959 called Beyond Survival. In the first chapter, author Max Ways (a Time political correspondent) talks about the inability of the United States to formulate policies that were not responses to crises from the outside, and what that would mean as the Cold War drifted to deadlock. What would happen to America as its foreign policy drifted into a dead end?

That, precisely, is the question. For if the fault in our national policy-making process is not to be found in the government itself nor in the public itself, it must be in the way these two are connected. Are the people being asked the right questions by their leaders? Is it possible under present circumstances for leaders to ask the right questions or for the people to answer? Can the great public issues that affect our destiny be framed in a way that allows helpful public participation?

Every citizen feels free and easy in expressing his opinion about specifics of what the government does or proposes to do; but we have become timid about discussing the ends and the fundamental beliefs that condition political action. This reticence shuts off the public from that part of political life with which it is most capable of dealing, the moral part. What can the citizen be expected to contribute to a discussion of how many aircraft carriers we should build or how we should handle the technical diplomatic problems of the Berlin crisis? Topics such as these are unprofitably kicked around in public argument while a near silence prevails upon the larger questions of what we are trying to do and the moral relations between our goals and the means we choose.

The only people breaking that near silence today are those on the left who seem to believe that our national goal should be to provide redress to the masses of the world who have been wronged by the power relationships in the past century, and those on the right who simply seem to believe that national power – in and of itself – ought to be our goal. And that, having kicked down opposing powers and established our primacy, that the people of the world would simply stand with us.

Both of these dangerous delusions seem to be based on the postmodern interpretation that power relationships are all, and that highlighting them, and where possible inverting them, is man’s noblest goal (note that I think there’s more to postmodernism than this – but not a lot more to postmodern politics).

The people who matter in this are, more than anything, the mythmakers – the Hollywood folks who this site is supposedly about. Because what we have misplaced somehow are the American myths that matter. I can’t lay them out here – I can’t even find my car keys, much less missing myths. But I think I know just a bit what they look like and can set out a post office sketch in case you happen to trip over them and care to bring them back to our attention.

But if instinctive patriotism and the patriotism of the city cannot be ours, what can be? Is there a type of patriotism peculiarly American: if so, is it anything more than patriotism’s violent relative nationalism? Abraham Lincoln, the supreme authority on this subject, thought there was a patriotism unique to America. Americans, a motley gathering of various races and cultures, were bonded together not by blood or religion, not by tradition or territory, not by the calls and traditions of a city, but by a political idea. We are a nation formed by a covenant, by dedication to a set of principles, and by an exchange of promises to uphold and advance certain commitments among ourselves and throughout the world. Those principles and commitments are the core of American identity, the soul of the body politic. They make the American nation unique, and uniquely valuable among and to the other nations. But the other side of this conception contains a warning very like the warnings spoken by the prophets to Israel: if we fail in our promises to each other, and lose the principles of the covenant, then we lose everything, for they are we.”[emphasis added]

That’s leftist professor John Schaar, from his essay on patriotism – ‘The Case For Patriotism.’ Schaar was one of my professors in college – sadly, on that I didn’t pay enough attention to back then – and one thing about his teaching was that it was largely based not only in texts – the Federalist Papers and Mill and Locke – but in novels that he felt encapsulated a greater truth about America and American politics – novels like Moby Dick and The Great Gatsby.

Because he understood that what it takes to understand America is to understand myths.

And I’ve got to tell you that everywhere I look in popular culture – movies, television, books, music – the only myths I see are ones that define themselves in opposition to this unstated myth, and leave it to be defined as a negative – defined by where it isn’t.

Where are our American myths today? How can we prevail in this conflict, except by brute power, without them? How can we refashion them, with proper reverence to the myths that brought us to this place and with relevance to a wider world that suddenly connects us to cultures far outside our own? What American myth can a young Palestinian child find to compete with the hateful death-embracing myths that he is being force-fed today?

Lincoln became an inspiration for Republicans and Democrats, evangelical conservatives and liberal-progressives alike. Even the ever dull Communists and ever angry radical socialists scraped a spark of inspiration from the mounting figure of Lincoln. But after every group had shaped its own statue of Lincoln according to its own manual, we’ve lost the real Lincoln. Lincoln has been turned into a concept and every concept began to be manipulated to fit ideologies and socio-political insecurities. And, as in the case of everything under the sun, the most insecure and the most unrelated ideologies manipulated Lincoln the most and claimed him the strongest.

In reality, there was and there is only one Lincoln. Many politicians have compared and continue comparing themselves to Lincoln without understanding that what transformed that poor tall Midwestern fellow into Abraham Lincoln was not his external attributes or his immediate surrounding.

Today many ‘Lincoln wannabe’ politicians believe that being young and charismatic, going from rags to riches, advocating the rights of oppressed, coming from Springfield, IL or even taking the same train trip to Inauguration is what makes the real Abraham Lincoln.

This is a ‘Victoria’s Secret’ version of Lincoln.

In fact, being shot in the back of the head for uncompromisingly fighting an unpopular war is what makes the real Abraham Lincoln.

It’s quite sad that 150 years after the Civil War, the mindset against which Lincoln fought all his life and by which he was eventually murdered, finalized the process of hijacking his legacy.

Through the ongoing “sissification” and castration of society, we ended up with an image of Lincoln as benign pacifist, kind and loving father who united the nation. We were given a half-portrait of a man and were taught to ignore the fact that before unifying the country, he divided it. He did not unify by his goodness alone, but by a ‘terrible swift sword’. He united by burning down cities, by sacrificing men in thousands and by destroying an entire civilization.

We are sold the image of Lincoln the lawyer, but before becoming a lawyer he was a rail-splitter, a ferocious wrestler who upon his arrival to a new town would challenge the strongest man around and beat him unconscious in front of an amazed crowd.

Let us not forget the toughness of the man.

He was neither a pacifist in his personal life nor in his politics; he was a fighter, a warrior. It is only on the background of this wild Midwestern force that we can outline and appreciate his kindness and goodness. It is also important to remember that it was not only his innate kindness that made him great but also his strong sense of justice.

Justice is a balance of mercy and severity. In this perspective, there is no doubt that Lincoln was a kind man of goodwill. When Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox, he claimed that he surrendered to Lincoln’s goodness as much as to Grant’s army. Lincoln’s personal anxieties about the tragic war are legendary and his love for all his fellow Americans, both North and South, are beyond dispute. But in order to get a real picture of a man, we have to acknowledge the other side of his personality. The side that was there to kill and bring justice through punishing war, the strength of conviction that would stop in front of nothing, the ability to sacrifice others and ultimately his own life for an ideal.

This is the image that was erased by the scribes and Pharisees of modern American scholarship who turned Lincoln into an anti-war Marxist hero in order to suit their frightened worldview.

Through the media they paint an image of Lincoln in watercolors and hang it in their plastic exhibition halls. And as they would glorify this new image they could not even imagine that if they had happened to live in the time of Lincoln, they would be the first to eternally ban his image from display.

The mindset that glorifies Lincoln today is the one that crucified him yesterday and will deny and accuse him every time he returns.

But somewhere there in the forgotten attic of our national memory hangs another image of Lincoln. It is an image carved with a nail on a rusted iron, an image that can scare one in a fierce battle. It is an image that his friend saw when he compared Lincoln’s look to an Indian chief entering an enemy camp. It is an image that is so deeply engraved into the Southern psyche that many still cannot forget and forgive it for the destruction he brought upon them and their families. In short, it is an image that we have to come in terms with, otherwise we are doomed to see it through the eyes of those who never really understood the man and never appreciated what the man did.