10-20-2022, 11:17 AM
Two works by Aaron Copland. Words by Carl Sandburg about Abraham Lincoln, the Great Emancipator, and germane to another Great Struggle in another Crisis Era eighty years later. I understand it in the context of World War II, a war in which Britain and America would do their emancipation all the way to Bergen-Belsen, Dachau, and Mauthausen. Abominable as chattel slavery was to anyone with a conscience, Nazi-style slavery and their Japanese partners in crime far surpassed that in horror. The struggle for survival would morph into one of deliverance of even the Germans and Japanese from the horrors that took over their countries.
As America would "disenthrall ourselves" -- the British had done their own emancipation of slaves before America did, and I suspect that Lincoln sought to imitate the British way of emancipation. Where the Allied Armies went, so would emancipation from the horror of fascist butchery and subjection. Both FDR and Churchill fit Lincoln's principles as well as possible
A Lincoln Portrait, 1942, premiered when the British and American armed forces were reeling from the Japanese in the western Pacific region:
... and then Appalachian Spring, premiered in the optimism of an impending victory of the Allied Powers over the demonic Third Reich. The world , most people thought. would return to normal at the end of the war.
The Cold War would come and go, but this exuberant optimism seems impossible to recover in the last eighty years or so. A hint: Aaron Copland would have worn this badge in a Nazi concentration camp:
![[Image: 50px-Pink_triangle_jew.svg.png]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/9c/Pink_triangle_jew.svg/50px-Pink_triangle_jew.svg.png)
Aaron Copland was a Jew and a homosexual.
As America would "disenthrall ourselves" -- the British had done their own emancipation of slaves before America did, and I suspect that Lincoln sought to imitate the British way of emancipation. Where the Allied Armies went, so would emancipation from the horror of fascist butchery and subjection. Both FDR and Churchill fit Lincoln's principles as well as possible
A Lincoln Portrait, 1942, premiered when the British and American armed forces were reeling from the Japanese in the western Pacific region:
... and then Appalachian Spring, premiered in the optimism of an impending victory of the Allied Powers over the demonic Third Reich. The world , most people thought. would return to normal at the end of the war.
The Cold War would come and go, but this exuberant optimism seems impossible to recover in the last eighty years or so. A hint: Aaron Copland would have worn this badge in a Nazi concentration camp:
Aaron Copland was a Jew and a homosexual.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.