Gettysburg Address -- ". . . a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal."

 Memorial in Gettysburg N. P. designating site of Lincoln's famous address 150 years ago today, Nov. 19, 1863.

Thoughts on The Gettysburg Address, delivered by Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, on November 19, 1863

Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. Nearly all Americans know the opening of this speech: "Four score and seven years ago . . . . "

Garry Wills's "Lincoln at Gettysburg" does the math on this opening line. We all should. Subtract "four score and seven years" from 1863 and what do you get? You get 1776. After his now famous opening line, Lincoln continues, " our fathers brought forth, upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal."

The U. S Constitution, written in 1787, ratified in 1788, was not our founding document. The Declaration of Independence of 1776 was. There is where we find the guiding philosophy underpinning our new nation.

Conservatives always, and Trumpists today, revere and use to their power-hungry advantage the minority control elements in the Constitution--the electoral college, the two senators for every state, daunting ratification hurdles, even the acceptance and support of slavery in its later, racist configurations. The very concept of "democracy" puts them on edge, creates strains of denial in their thinking, dangerous defenses in their actions.

It can all be confounding, perplexing. Many of us were taught from elementary school into high school to revere the Constitution as a genius created "bundle of compromises," even a permanent, almost god-given, document. It's not. Maybe for the day (eleven score and fifteen years ago), but not for the ages. Lincoln ended his great speech at Gettysburg with this admonition: "[we] shall have a new birth of freedom and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

It's time. Again.

"Arson Plus" by Dashiell Hammett

This is from the Library of America Story of the Week site.

Arson Plus
Dashiell Hammett (1894–1961)
From Dashiell Hammett: Crime Stories & Other Writings

Go here for story

So what has happened to Spade/Hammett since we last visited this blog?  Perhaps Z will enliven the traffic. Is it time to bring back Bridgid?  Sam sent her over.  The question is: Has she changed, learned her lesson?

On the "Falcon" set--Mary Astor/Brigid had a lot on her mind.

Market Greed and the Stuff Dreams Are Made Of

There's always room for one more take on The Maltese Falcon. Here's the New York Times film critic A. O. Scott's view of the great 1941 John Huston movie. He uses the three minute clip to relate themes from the Falcon to the collapse of the economy today.

GO HERE

Sam Spade -- Is His Code Our Code?

“For your private detective… wants to be a hard and shifty fellow, able to take care of himself in any situation, able to get the best of anybody he comes in contact with, whether criminal, innocent by-stander, or client.” — Dashiell Hammett, 1934

By 1935, after a hardscrabble apprenticeship, Dashiell Hammett was a major celebrity. The Maltese Falcon, and especially The Thin Man and the movie made from that not very good novel, placed him squarely in the literary-movie celebrity circles on both coasts. In that year, Gertrude Stein the literary lioness from Paris came to see what American culture was all about. While in Los Angeles, she asked her hostess if she could arrange a meeting with Dashiell Hammett. In conversation, she told Hammett that in the twentieth century, “The men all write about themselves . . . as women used to do in the nineteenth century.”

Stein reported later that Hammett agreed with this. “He said twentieth-century men lacked the self-confidence of men in the nineteenth century, and therefore had to exaggerate their own qualities.”

The character Sam Spade, and too many living and breathing men on into the twenty-first century have continued to do so. Unfortunately it’s not the best within themselves they exaggerate.

With this in mind, I answer those who, with varied attitudes — sneeringly, quizzically, enthusiastically — ask me: “OK Daily, you’ve pushed The Maltese Falcon at me for weeks. Now it’s time for you to come clean. Sam Spade – up or down, your kind of guy or not.”

My unvarnished view is that Hammett’s famous character not only personally rubs me the wrong way, I’d judge him a symptom of a problem in our society. And it’s all about what is being exaggerated in this famous hard-boiled, detective novel.

I feel the Sam Spade type too often serves as a model in our society. And that model is a flawed, distorted symbol of competence and manliness. Sam Spade serves as a reinforcing template for a sterile, narrowly professional, self as center, go it alone, hero. He lives by a code that is tough, personal, and cynical. And what are the qualities falling outside of this code?

Many readers are drawn to Sam Spade because he navigates the treacherous waters of a dangerous world with cool understanding and professional expertise. In the novel, this world stretches from Malta in the Mediterranean during the era of the Crusades to the contemporary alleyways of San Francisco. Across space and through time, all is a fog of danger and deviousness.

Spade strides through this fog, wise-cracking and self-assured. He always gives back more in pain and cunning than he receives. In the pursuit of the dingus, the black bird, the falcon, Sam and The Maltese Falcon’s cast of characters are driven by bloodless individualism.

Business partners die, marriages are betrayed and love is non-existent or fatally suspect. (Every love story in the novel, I count five, fails.) Lies constitute the language spoken, and the institutions created by society to keep this jungle life in check, the law and the police, are corrupt, timid, scoffed at.

As a writer of the famous Lost Generation, Hammett brings to mind Hemingway. The Maltese Falcon takes place at the end of the hollow excesses of the Roaring Twenties and on the eve of the Great Depression.

Readers of the day, especially men, were drawn to Spade and the manly, gun-slinging heroes of western and crime pulp fiction. Hammett manages to rise above the grossest of these macho heroes with Sam Spade, but the sensibility of his famous character remains the same. Spade is a loner. Spade is coolly professional. Spade trusts no one. Spade triumphs against all odds.

In the end, the novel seems to boil down to a bad joke pursuing a false reality guided by a blind code: A man’s got to do what a man’s got to do. We are all surrounded by evil and threats. Stand by your rough man, Effie. Falcons are fake and so are dreams.

Because to some degree reading great literature for me is reading great literature into one’s life and being, I reject Sam Spade, Hammett’s greatest creation. I can’t accept his aloneness. I can’t abide a society and individuals that inordinately value professional coolness.

And I need to trust other human beings and dreams.

If all this sounds naive, other worldly, sentimental, mawkish, then I would argue this reaction supports my case. Without going all Dr. Phil on this, Hammett’s Spade as a model to admire and copy serves and contributes, especially among the males of the species, to the crushing out of the social and the sharing needs of human beings. An exaggeration of male qualities I can read about, but attributes unworthy of idealization or emulation.

For some lovers of Hammett and his work, I’ve just kicked Sam in the head like some punk gunsel. Maybe. But I would never confuse this author’s characters with the creator. After all, Hammett wrote and lived this credo throughout the last decades of his life:

“We will work for united actions by all peoples, all religious groups and all nationalities, to defend democracy and combat anti-Semitism and Fascism.”

[Terre Haute Tribune Star, March 15, 2008 --Go Here]

Flitcraft, Trances and FTR Nightmares

“In reality, every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self.” – Marcel Proust

Literary critics and deep readers of Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon (this year’s Big Read book) are justifiably entranced with what has come to be called the “Flitcraft parable.” Next to the symbol and search for the falcon itself, Flitcraft’s story is the most intriguing puzzle in the novel.

Readers are jarred when suddenly reaching out from the pages of The Maltese Falcon, almost stopping the flow of the developing mystery, Sam Spade offers up the Flitcraft tale.

Briefly, the parable (read it for yourself in chapter 7, “G In the Air”) goes like this:

Flitcraft is a comfortably fixed professional, a model family man, no skeletons in the closet, no personal or business problems or tests on the horizon. He lives an acceptable and accepted life in Tacoma, Washington. On the way to lunch, a large steel beam falls from an upper story on a building construction site, just barely missing him. His escape from a random death brings Flitcraft to this belief: in the sensible ordering of his existence, “he had got out of step, not into step, with life.” Flitcraft never goes home that day; he disappears from the life he had been living.

Sam Spade traces Flitcraft down years later. He’s moved to Spokane. He’s settled down, renamed himself Charles Pierce, remarried, plays golf. It’s the Tacoma-life all over again. As Spade puts it: “I don’t think he even knew he had settled back into the same groove . . . But that’s the part of it I always liked. He adjusted himself to beams falling, and then no more of them fell, and he adjusted himself to them not falling.”

This interruption, this digression, sounds like nothing else in the book.

Here’s vintage Sam Spade dialogue: “Keep that gunsel away from me while you’re making up your mind. I’ll kill him. I don’t like him.” Spade speaks in a series of short punches to the solar plexus and moves on. In telling Flitcraft’s story, however, Hammett’s detective holds our attention for over three pages. By far the longest of Spade’s speeches. And the parable’s impact is to choke rather than punch. It’s not aimed at the stomach. It seeps into the night side of our being.

And the Flitcraft parable is a parable in the sense that it serves up a lesson, or some kind of truth. But unlike the “lessons” in today’s ubiquitous advice books, those offering simplistic, well-defined steps to success in everything from raising children to erasing credit card debt, the elusive truth in the Flitcraft parable is not one you can take to the bank and deposit in a “Ten Ways to Really, Really Be Very Happy” account.

Flitcraft’s truth is unsettling, not reassuring. It serves the willing reader by delving deeply into the meanings of living with ambiguity and chance while yearning for predictability.

Scholars of Hammett’s work seize on the Flitcraft story with relish. Many feel it’s the Rosetta stone to everything Hammett/Spade. And that’s well worth the brain exercise. But as Big Read readers, we can also lean forward and do our bad Sam Spade imitations, asking the experts: “Yeah, right. Flitcraft, Hammett/Spade, falling beams. If I read your damn book, what’s in it for me?”

Each reader eventually answers this question for her or himself. One thing is certain and applies to all. As readers we are readers of ourselves. We may “escape” into a book, but we choose the form and force of that escape. We may “identify” with characters, but identification comes through looking into a mirror. And we may dismiss a novel as “not real,” but that “not real” judgment comes from a gathering up of our personal experience, or the studied avoidance of the same.

So Flitcraft and the parable, too, is in ways shallow and deep, about us, the reader. As Proust puts it, readers have the unavoidable burden to be “. . . the reader of his own self.”

And could this burden be one reason why more Americans do not read powerful books? Are non-readers leery about what they may find out about themselves in the pages of such books? Are we, like Flitcraft, ready to adjust ourselves, “settle(d) back into the same groove,” and live trance like lives that seem easier, more comfortable, less demanding while we ignore the truths in the falling beams of great literary works?

Ah. Now that’s the stuff dreams, or is it nightmares, are made of.

[published in Terre Haute Tribune Star, March 9, 2008-- Go Here]

ONLY YOU CAN FIGHT THIS . . .

THE TRAGIC RESULT OF FTR!