Lincoln's Speech - But Not A Lincoln

Jimmy Breslin

August 7, 2002

On Sept. 11, that famous day of which we are all going to celebrate and mourn and commemorate, Gov. George Pataki will read the Gettysburg Address. He was chosen for that because he is just like Lincoln, tall.

Mayor Mike Bloomberg is reading the "Four Freedoms" by Franklin Roosevelt. I have trouble inside my head with this. But then here would come the man for you and me, and Rudy Giuliani is that man, and he will recite, or sing if he wants - he likes to sing - and this is what he will say or sing:

Springtime for Hitler and Germany

Deutschland is happy and gay

We're marching at a faster pace

Look out, here comes the master race.

Springtime for Hitler and Germany

Winter for Poland and France

....Don't be stupid, be a smarty, come and join the Nazi party.

There are a couple of more verses and Giuliani will be able to carry them easily. He should feel at home with the lyrics.

"Springtime for Hitler and Germany

U-boats are sailing once more."

As he sings he thinks of the sheer beauty of the snipers outlined against the eaves of the roof of City Hall as they aim rifles at the 75 AIDS people below them on Broadway who protest the non-existence of housing. They straggle and shuffle up the street. When the new step is a goose step. Why not shoot them? They cannot keep up. Then let them fall down and be gone.

"Springtime for Hitler." Of course it is bright and new and when this mother, this weeping mother of Patrick Dorismond makes a big thing out of him being shot while unarmed and not committing a crime, why we just go to the records on her. "Springtime for Hitler and Germany. We keep files on you!" Files. A, B, D, D. Here is Dorismond. A criminal. At age 6 he stole a sand pail for the beach. That's the record. "Your son is no altar boy," the mother is told. March on past her. Crush her if she gets in the way. She has no right to protest. She is the mother of a criminal. Springtime for Hitler. Would it be possible to have Giuliani's "Springtime for Hitler" blared to the city over loud speakers put up on telephone poles in almost every neighborhood? It would be poignant.

As for Pataki's reading of Lincoln, it is a good thing that the speech is short. The shortest ever anywhere. Then he can get on and get off without anybody starting to compare his usual syntax with the words of the speech.

I was raised with school books by supposedly reputable historians, that Lincoln wrote the Gettysburg Address on the backs of some envelopes during the train ride to Gettysburg, and he got up and read it and then sat down and nobody even knew he was there. Beautiful. Then, when I was 16, I went to work on a newspaper and I learned how much effort went into getting the life of a Richmond Hill phone company employee down to the three paragraphs for the obituary. The first one I wrote was 11 pages long. By the time I got that down to three paragraphs the guy was dead for so long that his wife had moved out - and that's what happened to me at the paper.

Therefore, with what little I know, and yet know of first hand, the least amount of time Lincoln could have spent on his Gettysburg Address was five weeks. Maybe more. He went around with it on his mind for a long time. "He had a level of eloquence shrouding him," my friend, Herb Gardner, the playwright, was saying yesterday. "I say much time in thinking and two weeks in the writing."

The most beautiful part of the fable is that after the speech nobody showed any emotion. Lincoln sat down and he thought that it hadn't gone anywhere.

What am I, a sucker? Here the guy spends that much time and he knows exactly what he is doing and that is destroying a whole crowd at Gettysburg and all the long winded history to follow.

This is nice. And we should always honor that speech by Lincoln. We also should make sure to laugh and sneer when Pataki gets up to recite it as if it is so important that he must be the one to read it.

But all of this is an opening act for what must be the one greatest show this city has seen, and that is Rudy Giuliani getting into the piece, feeling the piece, getting emotional as he sings for us all:

"Springtime for Hitler and Germany."