The Psychic Dreams of Mr. Lincoln

by Minnie Apolis Abraham Lincoln has been the subject of dozens if not hundreds of books and articles. Some of them mention the most famous of his prophetic dreams or visions, the one in which he sees his own catafalque (a temporary structure placed over the coffin of people of note) and is told that the President has died. But that was far from the only such dream, vision, or encounter with the Other Side. He and Mrs. Lincoln, the former Mary Todd of Kentucky, were rather avid attendees of seances and discussion groups with like-minded souls. Abe Lincoln's mind was on the spirit world almost as much as it was occupied by the gigantic job of managing the Civil War effort. He was probably more disposed to entertain the possibility of life after death after the untimely death of his son, Willie. He wrote that “ever since Willie's death, I myself involuntarily talking to him as if he were near me – and I feel that he is.” Willie was eleven when he died in February, 1862, of typhoid fever. (1) We may as well deal with the best-known incident first, the one referred to above in which Lincoln receives a premonition of his own death. Some months after his second inauguration, Lincoln and a few friends were discussing dreams mentioned in the Bible. He said that a couple nights earlier he had a dream in which a deathly stillness pervaded the White House. He “heard subdued sobs, as if a number of people were weeping. I thought I left my bed and wandered downstairs. There the silence was broken by the same pitiful sobbing, but the mourners were invisible. “I went from room to room; no living person was in sight, but the same mournful sounds of distress met me as I passed along. It was light in all the rooms; every object was familiar to me. But where were all the people who were grieving as if their hearts would break? I was puzzled and alarmed. What could be the meaning of all this? “I kept on until I arrived in the East Room, which I entered. Before me was a catafalque in which was a form wrapped in funeral vestments. Around it were soldiers who were acting as guards; there was a throng of people, some gazing mournfully upon the catafalque; others weeping pitifully. 'Who is dead in the White House?' I asked one of the soldiers. 'The President,' he replied. 'He was killed by an assassin.' Then came a loud burst of grief from the crowd, which woke me up from my dream.” Furthermore, he told William H. Crook(2) on Good Friday that he had dreamed three nights in a row that he would be assassinated. Crook tried to dissuade Lincoln from going to the theatre that night, but he felt duty-bound to fulfill his promise to Mrs. Lincoln to take her to the play. As early as the year 1840, Lincoln was attending meetings of spiritualists. About that time, he attended one such meeting in Illinois in which Peter Akers predicted that a time would come when the slave trade would no longer be conducted. Akers (3) is said to have predicted that the man who would lead the country through the turmoil of banishing slavery may be in the crowd that day. As indeed, he was, in the person of a young law clerk named Abraham Lincoln. There is some difference of opinion on whether any seances were actually conducted in the White House during Lincoln's terms of office. Some say that Mr. Lincoln did not attend, but that goofy Mrs. Lincoln did. Adding in an undertone, well, she went crazy later, anyway. The British seemed to consider it an open secret. If you happen to find an old copy of the British sheet music for “The Dark Séance Polka,”(4) you will find Lincoln on the cover, sitting in a darkened room holding a candle; underneath is the caption, “ABRAHAM LINCOLN AND THE SPIRITUALISTS.” At any rate, the Lincolns both consulted mediums after Willie's death. It appears that one woman became rather a favorite with them, a lady named Nettie Colburn Maynard (5). Historian Jay Monaghan(6) confirms a séance was held in the White House on Feb. 5, 1863 by Mrs. Maynard. She reportedly was playing the piano when it began to levitate. Lincoln and Colonel Simon Kase attempted to sit on the piano to hold it down, but it shook so violently that they gave it up. It also appears that Mr. Lincoln had some precognitive ability of his own. He reportedly awakened staffers at a telegraph office, demanding that they get a line through. He had had a vision, and he wanted to send a warning to the Union army regarding Confederate forces about to break through Union lines. A record to this effect was kept in the old War Department about this incident. This warning was received in time to avert a military embarrassment. Virtually from the moment he was nominated to be president in 1860, Lincoln had visions of what was in store. One of Lincoln's first biographers, Noah Brooks (7), recounts this tale. Lincoln had gone home to rest after a long day of political news. “Opposite where I lay was a bureau with a swinging mirror, and looking in the glass, I saw myself reflected nearly at full length, but my face had two separate and distinct images, the tip of the nose of one being about three inches from the tip of the other. . . I got up and looked in the glass, but the illusion vanished.” Lincoln saw it again, though, upon lying down again. He also noticed that one face was paler than the other. He got up once more, but the image melted away again. He told Mrs. Lincoln about it later in the day, and she interpreted it for him. She felt that it portended he would be elected twice, but would not finish the second term. After President Lincoln's death, not only mediums but ordinary persons reported unusual incidents. When Lincoln's body was taken by train to his home town in Illinois, townsfolk reported sighting Lincoln's ghost wandering between the vault and the crypt each night until he was interred. And all kinds of reports of a ghost train surfaced among railroad workers along the route taken by his body to Illinois. Switchmen, track walkers, brakemen, other rail workers, and even hoboes along the New York Central Railroad (which later became the Penn-Central), reported seeing a ghost train on the rails about midnight every April 27-29 (8) – leaving as the only proof that something eerie had happened the fact that all the watches and clocks were suddenly five to eight minutes slow. And the ghost of Lincoln himself has been seen or felt in many reports in years afterward. Among those who spoke of seeing his ghost include Eleanor Roosevelt, Teddy Roosevelt, Jackie Kennedy, and others. He also appears at Fort Monroe in Virginia, usually standing by the fireplace in the aptly name Lincoln Room – named because he stayed there when he met with his generals. Footnotes: 1- William Wallace Lincoln, 1999-2012, MrLincolnsWhiteHouse.org, http://www.mrlincolnswhitehouse.org/inside.asp?ID=18&subjectID=2 2- Crook, William Henry and Gerry, Margarita Spalding, Through five administrations : reminiscences of Colonel William H. Crook, body-guard to President Lincoln, 1910, http://www.archive.org/details/throughfiveadmin06croo 3- Bray, Robert, Abraham Lincoln and the Two Peters, Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association, Volume 22 Issue 2, Summer 2001, p. 40, Univ. of Michigan Library, http://quod.lib.umich.edu/j/jala?page=home 4- Taylor, Troy, Séances In The White House?, 2003-2008, PrairieGhosts.com, http://www.prairieghosts.com/a_lincoln.html 5- Maynard, Nettie Colburn, Was Abraham Lincoln A Spiritualist?, 1917, p. 33, snu.org.uk, http://www.snu.org.uk/Images/pdfs/Abraham%20Lincoln.pdf 6- Mary's Charlatans, 1999-2012, MrLincoln'sWhiteHouse.org, http://www.mrlincolnswhitehouse.org/inside.asp?ID=13&subjectID=2 7- Rogers, Lisa Waller, Bad Omen #1: Lincoln's Doppelganger, March 3, 2009, Wordpress.com, https://lisawallerrogers.wordpress.com/2009/03/03/abraham-lincoln-the-omen/ 8- Schlosser, S.E., Lincoln Death Train: A New York Ghost Story, 1997-2010, AmericanFolklore.net, http://americanfolklore.net/folklore/2010/07/the_lincoln_death_train.html

The Reason for the GOP's War on Women

It should be so obvious by now. The Republicans are backing such measures as discouraging insurance coverage of birth control, obstructing abortion in every way possible, and apparently wishing women back into the “barefoot and pregnant” 1950s. And what does this accomplish? If women get pregnant with second and third babies, then what with the cost of daycare, they may as well stay home and economize. And that is how the unemployment problem will be solved, GOP style – by taking women out of the workforce. Voila, with fewer people chasing the reduced number of jobs available in this country, the unemployment figures go down. Thereby making them (the Republicans) look good. Taking 46 percent of the work force out of the labor market will of course tend to open up the job market for males of all ages, even those over 50 or over 65. Assuming that all these males are actually able to perform the jobs that open up – and that is a huge assumption – then that naturally will tend to get them off the unemployment rolls, easing state UI deficits, and returning America to that mythical (and I emphasize the word mythical) golden era of the 1950s. What do you think – am I goofy to think this is their not-so-secret plan to cure unemployment? And yet – Mitt Romney has done another flip-flop (of course!). Videotape from January shows him saying he supports forcing poor women to go to work – even though he and wife Ann now declare that stay-at-home mom-ism is the way to go. “MSNBC’s Chris Hayes discovered that in January of this year, Mitt Romney told a crowd in New Hampshire that he wants to force poor women who stay at home to care for their children to go to work.” Roll the tape: http://www.addictinginfo.org/2012/04/15/mitt-romney-poor-stay-at-home-moms-should-work-video/ (VIDEO from MSNBC) FACTOIDS: Of working married women, 48% provide half or more of the household income (they are the primary bread winner and if we pay well, they want your jobs) (Source: Families and Work Institute Study) In 2007: Sixty percent of married mothers of preschool children are now in the work force, four percentage points fewer than in 1997. The rate for married mothers of infants fell by about six percentage points, to 53.5 percent. (Source: United States Bureau of Labor Statistics study, “Trends in Labor Force Participation of Married Mothers of Infants.”) In 2011 and 2012, women comprised a steady 46.8 percent of the total labor force; a steady 53 percent of all women were in the labor force. (Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics, BLS.gov at http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t01.htm)  

Book: "Goodnight Nobody" for desperate Connecticut housewives

"Goodnight Nobody" is a very good novel that is several cuts above the average mystery which is forgotten as soon as you finish it. An unusual mix of the literary with satire and mystery, it is hard to peg but easy to recommend. Kate is a fish out of water in her new Connecticut suburb, where everyone else is a Supermom and is careful to feed their kids only organic foods. She tries to befriend Kitty, but unfortunately she turns up dead when Kate and her kids show up for a play date. Oops, sorry to bother you, Kitty. Oops, the discovery turns on her latent reporter instincts and she is off nosing around for leads and interviews. There is much humor and hilarity in the novel, aside from the satire. Her own feelings of inadequacy, fed by her children's excellent timing in upchucking, her inventive lies which backfire on her, her best friend Janie who calls her back to herself as a reporter -- I only wish she had referred to her new hometown as Upchuck more often. Underneath are themes of self-erasure and identity. Women marry and move to "Upchuck" and we hardly have any idea what they did or what they were before they moved. None of the housewives have a paying position outside the home, and they are rather shocked when it is discovered that Kitty was helping write or research a famous columnist's material. On top of that, Kate's own husband seems to be less than supportive of her efforts to uncover the truth behind Kitty's murder. At the end, Kate and hubby Ben are separated while they sort out their marriage.  Goodnight Nobody, by Jennifer Weiner , Washington Square Press, 2005, 371 pages plus a helpful discussion guide for your local book club.  ISBN 978-0-7434-7011-7

BOOKS: “Calling Invisible Women” to assert themselves

by Minnie Apolis Stepping out of the shower to find that the bathroom mirror no longer registers your reflection does tend to give one pause. In “Calling Invisible Women”, the author addresses issues of self-erasure and feminism in a sweetly humorous way. The heroine, Clover Hobart, is a doctor's wife and mom of two young adults. She's at the age when a lot of women feel like they're invisible, anyway, but in her case it is literally true. It takes a couple of weeks before she is shocked to discover that she is not the only invisible woman, and in fact that several invisible women have been secretly meeting at a hotel conference room. The premise would be the stuff of farce or satire or both, but in the author's hands it seems to be merely a premise that allows her main character to go anywhere and be the fly-on-the-wall on the school bus and in her husband's offices. Along the way she busts up an attempted bank robbery, and orders her grown son to go home when he and a pal enter a tattoo parlor. Once she accepts that there is an upside to being invisible, she becomes fearless! The invisible women's support group informs her that a certain combination of prescriptions commonly written for menopausal women is the likely precipitating factor in their condition. And how many millions of women will identify with these victims who take meds for osteoporosis, hot flashes, and depression? Lots, I bet. Only very late in the novel does Clover finally meet a future son-in-law's mother, who is also invisible. She is more radical and insists on storming the gates of the pharmaceutical giant to get justice. Clover's reporter instincts kick in first in writing a first-person account of the bank robbery – while keeping her secret. Only later does she come out of the closet in a clarion call for all invisible women to unite against the corporate monster who did this to them. The takedown of the pharmaceutical company is much too hurried and pat. I would have liked to see a much different novel, with the emphasis on telling the story of invisible women coming out in the open and organizing a grass-roots campaign and/or boycott against the company. Kind of like Norma Rae, Part Two. Still, it is a likable novel with sympathetic characters who do not waste much time on self-pity. Clover gains support first from her best friend and neighbor, Gilda, her mother-in-law, and other invisible women. Predictably, the men are all hopeless and do not even realize she has become invisible. That list includes her husband, son, and physician. Clover aggravates matters by passively waiting for them to realize what is wrong, though – but once they become aware of her condition, they rally to her side. The themes bear some resemblance to another book I recently reviewed, titled "Goodnight Nobody" -- though they are not really in the same class with each other. But feminists will find pleasure in both. I'll give it just two and a half stars out of five. Promising draft, but needs more work. Might make a fun comic book or cartoon show, with little outlines for the invisible characters... The author is notable for taking up writing novels at the age of sixty, after a career as a nurse. Calling Invisible Women, Jeanne Ray, Crown Publishers, NY NY, May 2012, 246 pages. (review of uncorrected proof copy)

BOOK: “The Postmistress” about three women on cusp of war, 1941

by Minnie Apolis There are many novels and films whose plots will fit easily on the back of an envelope. Most of them fill in the spaces with lots of action or car crashes. This one does not; instead we we are smothered in more detail than is necessary to explain the plot. Believe you me, it was about enough to make me scream – or at least take a stern red pencil to the pages of the novel. A small-town doctor suffers guilt after a patient dies in childbirth. Said patient should have known enough to get to a doctor or hospital when her water broke, but that is an issue not addressed. This part of the story was much too drawn out, in my opinion. So anyway, the good and decent Dr. Fitch leaves his young wife to volunteer his services in London at the height of the Blitz. I was going to say that the story follows two women in the days before the United States got involved in World War Two. But on second thought, there are actually three. The young wife of the above doctor, named Emma. The postmistress in the same small town that Dr and Mrs Fitch live in; her name is Iris James. Then Frankie Bard, the radio reporter who gets a minute or two on Edward R. Murrow's broadcasts to relate her stories. The basic plot is that Dr. Fitch leaves a letter in the care of Postmaster James in case of his demise to give to Emma. But since the doc is overseas on his own, no one is responsible to report whether he is missing or not. The postmaster does receive a letter from Fitch's landlady in London, saying that he seems to be missing, but that letter is not delivered. Well, needless to say the doc buys the farm fairly early in the novel. By chance, Frankie scoops up his last unmailed letter to his wife, intending to mail it to Mrs. Fitch. But Frankie is about to spend three weeks in France and Germany, riding the rails and recording people's stories. She never mails it, but after a rest, travels to the Fitch's hometown to hand deliver it. Well! Is she ever stunned to realize that no one has told Mrs. Fitch that she is a widow. She never delivers the letter, but the postmaster finally delivers the doctor's letter that he had entrusted to her safekeeping. So that is the basic synopsis. If it sounds like something you might want to read, by all means follow up on that. It did not do much for me, sorry about that. It reads like it might have been a memoir written by the fictional Frankie Bard. The author did a fair amount of research on the era, on postal equipment and regulation, on Mr. Murrow, and on the war in Europe 1938-1941. Yet the resulting story seems awfully wispy, with few plot turns and rather sketchy character delineations. The one theme that could have been hammered home a bit more, but is not even mentioned in the study guide in back, is the rationale for telling the news. WHY do reporters insist on telling the news, and to whom are they speaking anyway? And WHY for gosh sakes do they insist on telling us BAD news? How much of that do they think we can take, as if we don't have enough to struggle with in our own lives. So as the sage reporter, Martha Gellhorn, once told Frankie, “I belonged to a Federation of Cassandras, my colleagues the foreign correspondents, whom I met at every disaster.” And all the Cassandra reporters gasp out their reports of news so bad that we cannot believe it is really so, we cannot see it for ourselves, and then when the press does show us, we cannot bear any more of it and look away. The fictional Frankie keeps trying to tell the story of the millions of refugees in Europe desperately trying to get out, but no one wants to hear about those horrors. While it was a novel and a theme worth addressing, I remain disappointed in the result. Oh, BTW, one cool tidbit is that the first notes of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony are the same as the Morse code for the letter V (dit dit dit dash), which the resistance hums as a message of defiance at their Nazi oppressors. (Morse code video on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0HrbCbfwlg) THE POSTMISTRESS, by Sarah Blake, Berkeley, 2010, 352 pages of novel plus brief notes and study guide. ISBN 9780425238691

Newsviner Benno Writes of History of Wars over Resources

by Minnie Apolis One of our own, Benno Hansen, has written “Ecowar: Natural Resources and Conflict”, an interesting book on the topic of the relationship between climate and wars over resources. Benno maintains that wars are more often waged over resources – whether because the resources are scarce, or because they are valuable – than over religion. Climate change comes into play because a slightly colder climate will tend to make food scarcer, forcing tribes or nations to compete for farmland, storehouses, etc. Even a difference of one degree, as he mentions in a section on China, will start to be reflected in population records. “A 1 degree cooling,” he writes, “coincided with the fall of the Ming dynasty. Population growth is seen to rise during the 1741-1805 warm phase and drop during the 1806-1850 cold phase. The war periods generally lag the onset of cold phases by 10 to 30 years which makes sense since it would take some time for the reduced agricultural productivity to manifest as resource limitations and overpopulation (p. 16).” Research like this is only possible in countries that keep detailed records for long periods of time. Another culture that keep useful records for this kind of research was Bavaria. The records showed “significant correlation between the amount of rain, the price of rye and the rate of property crime: They rose and fell together (p. 20).” Another fascinating tho bloody episode was the war in Angola, with one side funded by the oil trade and the opposition funded by the diamond trade. Now there's a twist on the term “resource war”! While most of the conflicts discussed in the book are historical, some conflicts are sure to hit the headlines as global warming and melting ice caps increase competition for everything from oil to fishing stocks. What will the fish in the Bering Sea do when the waters get too warm for them? Will they swim north or die off? And will it be economically feasible for fishermen to follow the schools north, if that is indeed what the fish will do? While most of the time the only instance when water rights hit the news is when an agreement is signed, in 2009 water became a serious issue in Kenya. The BBC reported that a crime syndicate was diverting half the water that was supposed to go to farm irrigation. The United Nations estimated almost 4 million Kenyans were in need of emergency food aid, and both water and electricity had to be rationed. (The hydro-electric dams were running dry!) Even in discussion of modern conflicts where we think we know pretty well what is going on, there are surprises. For example, in Darfur, Benno states that “a strong correlation between annual temperature variations and civil war in the 1980-2002 period for the area has been shown statistically.” Sudan is also in danger of losing its rubber business, as the long-term drought reduces the yield of the biggest rubber producer in the world. In spite of the wealth of material and research behind this work, I could make a laundry list of weaknesses. One is the near-total lack of graphic material. Talking about the correlation between temperatures, population and war is just not as strong as seeing a chart. And I am sure there are works of art – paintings, sketches, even mosaics and maps – that would help flesh out the verbiage. One of the few illustrations is an old ad, apparently from the time of the Berlin airlift, with the headline: “Milk . . . new weapon of Democracy!” What's there is good, but Benno just needs to write more of it. A book on such an important topic could run to several volumes, if you really wanted. But at any rate, I find 144 pages is just not enough to flesh out the theory or the history. One of the happy surprises in the book was an introductory section where that author talks in the voice of Neanderthal hunter living with his family on the edge of the glaciers. There, the competition was with sapiens, and obviously the Neanderthals lost. I would have enjoyed reading a bit more of his tales of life as seen through the filter of his theory, and as seen through the eyes of people who lived through eras of desperate competition for food, water, land and access to any and all resources. Benno wrote six such “Interludes” as he calls them. I enjoyed them and hope that he would consider adding more of them to illustrate struggles over resources, or perhaps develop them into longer “interludes”. Some of the Interludes are sure to be controversial. One deals with the shooting down of a United Nations plane bearing Dag Hammarskjold in 1961 by British forces over Rhodesia. It is far too brief, with no explanation of the African crisis that Hammarskjold was flying towards in hope of calming the situation. I suspect that Benno assumes that all of his readers know the details, but the fact is many of his readers were born after that tragedy occurred. Other types of violence can spring from resource scarcity besides wars. One of the more interesting segments was on the correlation between food prices to riots. “When marked on a graph of the UN food price index, riots clearly cluster around price spikes.” At the same time, Benno does acknowledge that the relationship between food prices and riots is a complex one. “The researchers do not conclude 'high food prices cause riots'. What they say, is that expensive food could be one factor among others setting the stage for riots. When populations are hungry, it takes lesser trigger incidents to kick-start a riot (p. 81).”

Books: Deaver handles celeb stalker plot with realism and panache

by Minnie Apolis “X O” is the oddly titled Jeffery Deaver novel of a stalker who trails after a country-pop engenue named Kayleigh Towne. It is a topic was played for laughs in one of the Stephanie Plum novels (Fearless Fourteen), but that's OK. Deaver is good at realism and thrillers, and of course with his recurring character Kathryn Dance, he can't miss. The stalker, Edwin Sharp, is spooky the way he hacks her newest email address within hours – never mind bombarding her with 50 or so emails. He shows up at a lunch at her fave roadside diner early in the book; how did he know when she would be there? Kayleigh is an enormously gifted singer-slash-songwriter in the country genre, the daughter of another country legend. Her squeaky clean image is the result of burying a deep secret from her teen years. Her mother, incidentally, died about the same time as that other ahem, incident. Strangely enough, her stalker has also gone through a tough period of rejection from a girlfriend and the death of his mother. Geez, they have so much in common, y'know? It's like, in another world, they'd be soul mates. The bodies start to pile up, with the victims having in common a motive clear to the mind of a stalker. They all stood in the way of the stalker and the object of his desire, or they threatened the well-being of the performer in some fashion. We know very early on that there is a stalker out there, and we meet him very early in the novel. But Deaver keeps the spinning the needle between Guilty or Innocent so many times that we, the reader, get dizzy from it. Sure he's weird, but he's just a harmless loser. Or no, he's not harmless, he's just a good faker and a really dangerous psychopath. We don't learn the answer till several red herrings have been played out. There are, as usual in a Deaver novel, several twists and turns in the plot, which turns out to have two guilty parties in this instance. The final, small twist on the last page is the one I am not buying, tho it hardly makes any difference in the larger picture. I'll give it three and a half stars out of five. I am a very tough grader, so you may rate it higher. X O, Jeffery Deaver, Simon & Schuster, 2012. 371 pages not including the lyrics to the songs mentioned in the story, which appear at the back of the book. ISBN 9781439156377