I complain about the United States not being Athens. I certainly say we are a very good Roman republic, and the lies are based upon the most advanced… - Gore Vidal

Once a country is habituated to liars, it takes generations to get the truth back.

World events are the work of individuals whose motives are often frivolous, even casual.

Our form of democracy is bribery, on the highest scale.

What is going on here is a deliberate revision by Current not only of Lincoln but of himself in order to serve the saint in the 1980s as opposed to the saint at earlier times when black were still colored, having only just stopped being Negroes. In colored and Negro days the saint might have wanted them out of the country, as he did. But in the age of Martin Luther King even the most covertly racist of school boards must agree that a saint like Abraham Lincoln could never have wanted a single black person to leave freedom's land much less bravery's home. So all the hagiographers are redoing their plaster images and anyone who draws attention to the discrepancy between their own past crudities and their current falsities is a very bad person indeed, and not a scholar, and probably a communist as well.