Thaddeus Stevens Out-Trumped Trump
A couple blogs back, I posited the idea that I might base my next work on the life of Thaddeus Stevens, the Great Commoner who was more committed to the cause of Emancipation than Abraham Lincoln, and who dedicated his last years to legislating Negro suffrage and education. The fact that he had been greatly libeled, as was Richard III, no doubt had something to do with it. (And who could resist Tommy Lee Jones’ portrayal of the man in the excellent 2012 film Lincoln?)
Now that I am 17 pages to the end of an excellent biography by Fawn Brodie (and six weeks to the end of Stevens’ life), I am regretfully abandoning the project. He said something that I simply could not stomach.
Upon the failure of the Senate to convict President Andrew Johnson on what amounted to a trumped up impeachment, Stevens remarked, “If the tyranny becomes intolerable, the only resource will be found in the dagger of Brutus. God grant that it many never be used.”
Here Stevens out-trumps Trump. Assassination is never something you joke about or mention as a possible political solution, even with the totally useless postscript Stevens added to his remark. He himself should have recognized the horror, since much of the Reconstruction mess might have been avoided had Lincoln remained at the helm.
As for our current generation, there are still a lot of us out there who can remember where we were when Kennedy was assassinated.
Then there was the near assassination of Ronald Reagan. I will preface this by saying that I thought he was pretty bad as presidents go. I found him particularly shortsighted on environment, education, and the AIDS epidemic. Yet when John Hinckley shot Reagan for the stupidest of reasons, I was furious and unforgiving.
Murder and attempted murder are bad enough, but when the target is an elected official, it amounts to disenfranchising the people who voted for him. It is an attack on not just the person but on the entire government.
There is another reason why you do not joke about it or say anything that might be construed as approval. Our words are the father of our deeds. Hate crimes are always preceded by hate speech. And in today’s poisonous political climate, there’s plenty of hate going around.
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BTW, the corrosive power of hate figures a great deal in my novel, where vendettas cause blowback, destroying the would-be destroyers. The happy characters are the ones with a sunny and forgiving disposition.