An Abraham Lincoln in Pakistan 2
By Mohammad Ashraf Chaudhry
Pittsburg, CA
Pakistan in 1971 did not face a more dire situation that did America or its
president, Abraham Lincoln in 1860's. Pak istan lost its half because of
mismanagement and because of the political dishonesty of its leaders. The
elections were held on the basis of one man, one vote. The results of the
elections, however, were interpreted as it suited the incumbent leaders. Even a
child could have saved Pakistan, had the Bengalis been treated better; had the
power been transferred to them as per the elections; and had the action against
the secessionists been accompanied with the flavor of compassion and pardon as
was done by Lincoln. America lost 618,000 Americans in the Civil War of
1861-1865(this number of casualties exceeds the America's loss in all its other
wars, from the Revolution to the Vietnam war), and yet America remains one,
solid, prosperous and most powerful country. Pakistan even after having lost its
half in 1971, is still fighting its war of survival, always accusing foreign
powers, and never looking inward and making the necessary correction.
If the leadership of 1971's in Pakistan interpreted the results of the elections as per its whims; same way, the current leadership is interpreting the verdict of the Supreme Court on the NRO, the way it find suiting its interests. Small families pursuing such a dysfunctional and dishonest policy meet disasters, and they disintegrate, not to speak of countries. It is a historical fact now that no other leader has delivered more than what Lincoln did for his people and his country. He kept the United States of America united. George Washington was the founder of America; but Abraham Lincoln is, indeed, the real maker of it; its tone-setter; its quintessential liberator, its archetypal spirit and essence; America’s Americanism, i.e. its “common man” who yet was so un-common as characterized by Time in 1963; its moral compass around which revolves any ordinary American’s ordinary life. The most lethal “fratricidal conflict” that had the potential to destroy any great leader; actually made this wood-splitter as the greatest leader ever born.
The truck-loads of muck that is being unloaded on the Pakistani leadership these days, appears nothing when compared to what Lincoln had had to go through, and without any justification.
Was there a slander, a libel, an invective and an adverse epithet in the art of character assassination that was not tried and applied when it came to defiling him! I doubt. The press publicly called him, “a grotesque baboon; a third-rate country lawyer, a third-rate statesman who once split rails and now splits the Union; a coarse vulgar joker; a lewd jester; a dictator, a long-armed ape, a buffoon…”. The Illinois State Register openly called him, “the craftiest and most dishonest politician that ever disgraced an office in America”. The Pakistan leadership’s bickering in the wake of media criticism sounds like an eulogy when compared with the relentless charade of humiliation that Lincoln had had to go through or that he had to put up with.
Pakistanis leadership is essentially rich and it loves to be so, and wants to stay so. Lincoln, on the contrary was poor. He had tasted poverty that perhaps no slave would have, and he loved it. Clyde Wilson, a Professor of History at S. Carolina University sums up his life as, “shabby and Tawdry…” No man could possess a poorer resume than Lincoln did. He had no family background; and he possessed no lands, no lordship of any estate; no links; no money; no formal education, (maximum one year); no executive or administrative experience other than running a grocery store in partnership, and that too ending up in a bankruptcy; no peace of mind at home, no manners, (as reported by his friend Herndon, Lincoln would eat an apple by digging his teeth in it direct as he disdained the use of a knife; he stored his more important business papers in his queer, long hat etc and no refined taste which one biographer labels as ‘Rabelaisian”, and his crude and vulgar jokes which he would not resist sharing even in the grimness of the Civil War. For example, this joke, `An American patriot Ethan Allen once traveled to England shortly after the Revolution.
His English hosts, hoping to rile him, hung a picture of George Washington in their outhouse (latrine). Allen, after his first visit there, told them, he thought, this was a perfectly appropriate place for it. "Why" they asked him curiously. "For , said Allen, "there is Nothing that will make an Englishman SHIT so quick as the Sight of Genl Washington". This poor, prairie boy, (Lincoln) did not ride the fame of his spouse to preserve his name in the annals of history. He earned it by dint of his character, because as is endorsed by all historians , he `jester with a taste for outhouse humor, a brilliant lawyer with an unrivaled flair for close analysis, a compelling orator who could move audiences to tears, a masterly politician with a shrewd eye for the public mood, and a gloom, miserable loner who suffered from never lied, never dodged, never avoided a chastisement; never criticized anybody; never hesitated to forgive; never retained any malice against anybody. He remained all his life, upright, tireless, loyal, kindly, humorous, hungry for self-improvement and knowledge, and above all, `a common man' who otherwise was a very uncommon person. The Time magazine calls him, "a mercurial figure who could be a boisterous, storytelling extrovert at one moment and a gloom, haunted introvert the next. He was a character, in the sense people used the word in his time and ours; a larger than life figure who enthralled those he met with his unlikely mixture of signature traits. Within his awkward, towering frame there was room to accommodate a backwoods the "hypo", his term for his bouts of depression and despair". Compare him to our present day leadership in Pakistan. Do such leaderships save a country, is an open question!.
And then by nature, Lincoln was a "knight with a woeful countenance”, essentially a sad person. Our Pakistan leadership also claims itself to be the direct repository of two “martyrs”, a Sphinx that has arisen out of the ashes or blood of Bhutto dynasty. But do people accept this claim as genuine? Some attributed Lincoln’s melancholic posture to his failure to marry his love, Ann Rutledge who had died a premature death; and some to his marrying a woman, whom he didn’t want to marry. He tried to avoid this happening, his marriage, by disappearing on the very day of his marriage; he contemplated committing suicide twice. And some interestingly trace his perennial sadness to a mule’s kick which he received some time in his youth.
Marry Todd, his ambitious wife, whom historians call, his ‘conjugal affliction’ , was a boastful, shrewd, and shrill-voiced, haughty woman, just his opposite. Someone once asked Lincoln why the Todds spelled their names with a double ‘d’ . Lincoln who most often employed his home-spun humor, replied, “one ‘d’ was good enough for God, but that the Todds had to have two”. Once Marry had set her eyes on Lincoln, then, as they say, even destiny could not have saved him. She onward openly began boasting, “she would one day marry a man who would become President of the United States”, writes Dale Carnegie. This sounded not only silly, but also utterly far-fetched, keeping in view the financial and social position that Lincoln enjoyed. People laughed, but not Marry Todd who rebutted all by saying, ‘just watch’ . Some maintain that it was her ambition that made this most unknown and common American become the most important man in American history. And this is very not untrue. In the current Pakistani leadership, it is the reverse. The brilliant, Ms. Benazir had been the spouse of the current president of Pakistan. What political acumen, what sagacity, what foresight, what kind of ambition did she inspire in him! At the time of elections, the Democrats accused the Whig party of which Lincoln was the nominee as a party of the aristocrats who wore costly clothes and who approached the poor people for votes, a situation akin to that in Pakistan. On that occasion, Lincoln made this soul-rending political speech in order to silence them, “I came to Illinois as a poor, strange, friendless, uneducated boy, and started working on a flatboat for eight dollars a month, and I had only one pair of breeches to my back, and they were buckskin. When buckskin gets wet and dried by the sun, it shrinks; and my breeches kept shrinking until they left several inches of my legs bare between the lower part of my breeches and the top of my socks. And while I was growing taller, the breeches were getting wet and becoming shorter and tighter until they left a blue streak around my legs that can be seen to this day. Now if you call that being a fancily dressed aristocrat, I must plead guilty to the charge”.
This was the poorest leader of the would be richest country whom once his opponents accused of being eccentric because he was hit by the mule.
Reading Dale Carnegie’s book, “Lincoln: the Unknown”, on many an occasion, I wept and laughed simultaneously, feeling that Lincoln was the man whom any ordinary person any where, even in Pakistan, notwithstanding the cultural differences, could relate to for poverty knows no boundaries. It is everywhere the same. It is a historical fact that in 1861, when he got elected as the 16th President of the United States of America, the people of Springfield in Illinois knew very little who actually had walked in their midst.
Carnegie draws this beautiful picture in these words.
“For years the future great President had been walking down their streets almost every morning with a market-basket over his arm, a shawl about his neck, going to the grocery store and butcher’s shop and carrying home his provisions. For years he had been going about each evening to a pasture on the edge of the town and cutting out his cow from the rest of the herd and driving her home and milking her, grooming his horse, cleaning the stable, and cutting the firewood and carrying it in for the kitchen stove”. This unknown and unacknowledged person, after his death came to be described by Walt Whitman as, “… four sorts of genius, four mighty and primal hands, will be needed to the complete limning of this man’s future portraitthe eyes and brains and fingertouch of Plutarch and Aeschylus and Michel Angelo assisted by Rabelais”. (To be continued)
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