Sophrosyne and Meat-Eating

Today, when I was in the cafeteria, I was thinking about veganism/vegetarianism. They have a lot of fake meat in the cafeteria (imitation chicken, etc). If eating meat is inherently wrong, is it sophrosynic to eat this imitation meat? My initial thought was no because, if you are naturally inclined to do the right thing, then you wont need to trick yourself with fake meat. What do you all think?

Lincoln as a Self-Made Man

I was interested in our discussion the other day about whether Lincoln would have been elected President today, having no formal education. I agree that America would not elect someone without a college education to be President. However, if Lincoln had existed today, I think maybe he would have a college degree. Today, the idea of a "self-made man" often involves working really hard in school to get a scholarship to college. Lincoln probably would have been able to go to college today, maybe through scholarships and loans. I thought Jamie made a good point in class when she said that it was contradictory how although we idealize the "self-made man", we probably wouldn't elect somebody who was self-educated the way Lincoln was. I think we only appreciate self-made men if they follow a certain path. We want self-made men to choose to go to college and get a good job. If somebody else's idea of a self-made man is living off the grid, or working a minimum wage job, we don't celebrate that, even though it may have been "self-made" (they came to it on their own, didn't get help achieving it from anybody else).

1st Inaugural Address

A passage in Lincoln's first Inaugural Address stuck out to me, and I wanted to see what you all thought of it. "Physically speaking, we cannot separate. We cannot remove our respective sections from each other, nor build an impassible wall between them. A husband and wife may be divorced, and go out of the presence, and beyond the reach of each other; but the different parts of our country cannot do this."
Lincoln is right that physically, the South cannot separate from the North. But most continents make up many different countries, unlike North America. I think the United States is way too big a country to work together cohesively, and the Civil War is an example of this. Why can't the South and the North split up? They would still need some sort of working relationship as separate countries, but I don't understand why Lincoln thought that just because they couldn't physically separate, they wouldn't be able to be two distinct countries.

Spectrum of Racism

Our class and blog discussions about Lincoln's possible racism have been very interesting to me. It seems like not all of us are working with the same definition of racism. I think that if a person in power (in this example, a white person) upholds or reinforces unequal power dynamics between the races, then they did something that was racist. It doesn't mean that the person, at their core, is "a racist". We have defended Lincoln by essentially saying "it's not as if he was as bad as a lyncher", but not being a lyncher doesn't mean you are not racist. If we view racism as a spectrum, lyncher would probably be all the way on one end. But there are a lot of points between "lyncher" and "100% not racist". Lincoln did say some racist things. He isn't as bad as a lyncher, or someone who never thought to oppose slavery. But that doesn't mean he wasn't racist at all, it just means he wasn't as racist as he possibly could have been. I'm not really invested in proving Lincoln was racist (most white people are at some point), but I just wanted to explain my view of racism as a spectrum and see what you all thought.

Mary Todd's Portrayal in Gore Vidal's "Lincoln"

I may be alone in this, but I actually thought Mary Todd's portrayal in Gore Vidal's "Lincoln" was much more sympathetic than in the last two films. This seems to be the first film to acknowledge that she most likely suffered from a mental illness. The others just portrayed her as having all of these personality flaws without any explanation. Also, there was one bit of dialogue that really stuck out to me. Mary Todd is with the handmiaden who says something to the effect of, "The newspapers don't portray you accurately at all", and Mary responds "Nobody does" (this is all paraphrased). I thought that maybe this was an acknowledgement of how Mary Todd has been seen as unlikeable and mean, and viewed unsympathetically throughout history. Did anybody else think this? In any case, I found that dialogue to be very sad, and I felt sympathetic toward Mary Todd.

Racism

Miller seems overly defensive of Lincoln, especially related to matters of racism. He keeps pointing out that the term "racism" had not yet been coined in Lincoln's time, but does that really matter? Racism did exist, it just didn't have a name. I don't see the harm in pointing out possible racism of Lincoln using our modern language. A lot of people excuse prejudice by saying that the person was "a product of their time". Racism was widespread during Lincoln's life (and still is), but if there were people questioning it then, then why didn't he? I don't think the time period is a very good excuse (I know there have been discussions in class and on the blogs about this topic but I am just forming my opinion now so that's why I haven't responded to anyone in particular).

Is Lincoln a Radical?

To quote Angela Davis, "radical simply means 'grasping things at the root'". If we use this definition of radical, was Lincoln a radical? In a way, he was. Lincoln did abolish slavery-it can be argued that slavery is the root of racial oppression in America. Some would have simply advocated for reforming slavery so that slaves would be treated more ethically and given some rights as slaves, rather than wanting to abolish slavery as an institution. However, in most other ways, Lincoln was not a radical. He didn't seem particularly interested in ending prejudiced thinking against Black people (no, racism was not a term used back then, but it doesn't mean racism didn't exist and couldn't be identified). It makes me wonder why Lincoln was so opposed to slavery, yet he did not view Black people as equal and the Emancipation Proclamation did not grant citizenship to slaves.