"A fellow ain't got a soul of his own, just a little piece of a big soul, the one big soul that belongs to everyone."

 

That's the bit from "Grapes of Wrath" that I wasn't able to recite off the top of my head as I was recording my podcast yesterday and got to the item about the historian Jon Meacham, who'd helped write Joe Biden's victory speech.  Meacham has a book titled "The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels" and Biden's speech expressed a desire "to rebuild the soul of America." 

Here's the post I was reading in the podcast, and here's the podcast. At 21:40, I begin speaking extemporaneously: 

"I want to get into this idea of 'the soul of America'.... What do you think of the idea that a country has a soul?... I like to think of the idea that individual human beings have a soul, and when I hear of this composite soul of an entire country, I'm skeptical.... That's what makes me think of fascism.... especially if you're not acknowledging the soul of individual people, and so often, from the Democratic side, I get the sense that they view their opponents as being soulless... and I feel that they're also antagonistic to individualism. Everyone needs to think the same thing, and people should be cancelled if they don't all say the same thing.... I read that as a rejection of the sense that individual people have a soul, and then you come at this with the idea that America has a soul. There's just an Oversoul to America. I know you can go very deeply into that. It reminds me of that speech in 'The Grapes of Wrath'... and I know there's some Emerson stuff you could put there. But I'm not writing a post. I'm doing a podcast. So I can't get into the research and come up with stuff. But if I were reading and writing right now and not talking — and this is the advantage of reading and writing — I would research those things, and I would add a few little things,  but why don't you go do it? You go read that."

Here's the Ralph Waldo Emerson essay, "The Over-Soul." Excerpt:

At last night's canceled Trump rally, why did individual protesters, asked on camera what they were protesting, say "I choose not to answer"?

In the comments to the first post of the day, sane_voter said:

Lots of Mexican flags at the riot, with the folks holding them flipping the bird and shouting profanity. Just doing the jobs that many Americans won't do.

Original Mike said "I saw that" and added:

Fox had reporters going through the crowd later in the evening. When asked why they were protesting, several protesters said "I choose not to answer". WTF kind of protester is that?

I'm making a separate post out of that because I believe the question is easy to answer. I know the answer from thousands of history lessons and Hollywood movies, like that one where the child disperses a lynch mob by talking to one individual and calling him by name.



There are the things people do in groups, where the individual is merged with the feeling of the whole group, where the group activity deafens the individual's access to conscience...



... and the way the conscience can snap back when the individual is singled out, confronted squarely, and asked to speak — to bring forward thoughts from his own mind. In the movies, that individual stares silently, then turns and goes away. On television, with a microphone aimed at his face, he says: "I choose not to answer."

The greatest mob break-up in the history of cinema came, I believe, in the 1927 silent film "King of Kings," discussed a few years ago on this blog, here. The mob is about to stone a woman to death for the sin of adultery, and Jesus goes one by one to individuals and writes in the sand, for each, the name of a sin. Each individual, on seeing the name of his sin, turns and walks away.

"What lessons could today's leaders learn from [Lincoln]?"

A question posed to University of Wisconsin history prof Stephen Kantrowitz (on the occasion of the release of the Spielberg movie "Lincoln"):

Lincoln learned from experience and grew while in office. Born and raised in a white supremacist society, he believed as late as the fall of 1862 that whites and blacks could not live together as equals and that, if freed en masse, blacks would have to depart the United States. But by the end of his life he came to understand the wartime struggles of slaves and free blacks as morally equivalent to those of the American Revolution, and to imagine a place for African-Americans as equal citizens of the republic. He did not confuse clarity of purpose with rigidity of outlook.

Also at the link, UW film prof Jeff Smith talks about movies about Presidents. What other films about Presidents should there be?

The big surprise is that there has been no biopic about George Washington. If Lincoln does well, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Jon Meacham’s book, “American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House,” get optioned. Jackson’s persona lends itself to screen treatment.  And I have no doubt that Barack Obama will someday be profiled — he has made history, after all.

What's the best portrayal of a President in the movies? Smith says Henry Fonda in "Young Mr. Lincoln," but, as Smith notes, that film doesn't depict Lincoln as President.

The old film, directed by John Ford, has a murder trial at its center: Lincoln’s first real case as a lawyer in Springfield, Ill.

So you can put that film on your list of best depictions of lawyers. Smith notes that like "Young Mr. Lincoln," the new Lincoln movie concentrates on a brief slice of Lincoln's life. But the slice in Spielberg's movie is a grand achievement: the 13th Amendment. The choice of a grand or a little-know incident is going to make a big difference in the type of movie it is, and also Spielberg isn't John Ford. Nevertheless, both Henry Fonda and Daniel Day-Lewis are dreamy.