Lincoln's Gettysburg Address Today - weekly column for 19 November 2019

Mack Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address Today

On November 19th, 1863, Abraham Lincoln gave his almost perfect address at Gettysburg as a memorial to the soldiers killed in that terrible battle months before.

Given the poor diction by public speakers on the radio and television and in government today, we can only wonder how President Lincoln might have phrased his Gettysburg Address now. Not only do our leaders and image-makers fail to recall history (it’s not S.T.E.M., after all), they also often fail to speak without a clutter of adverbs, tired metaphors, and other pointless filler:
So, like, four score and seven years ago, like, our iconic forepersons actually brought forth on this iconic continent, actually a new nation, like, you know, conceived in Liberty and the concept of recycling, and actually dedicated to the iconic proposition that all persons are actually created equal without, like, regard for gender identification, like, you know.

So, like, now we are actually engaged, like, in a great iconic civil war, ironically, testing whether, like, that iconic nation, or any nation actually so conceived and so, like, dedicated, can, like, actually long endure. We are actually met on a great battle-field of that iconic war. We have actually come to dedicate a portion of that iconic field, as an actual final resting place, like, for those who here actually gave their lives that that nation might live. So, like, it is altogether fitting and proper that we should actually do this.

But, so, like in a larger sense, we can not, like, actually dedicate -- we can not actually consecrate -- we can not actually hallow – this, like, ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have ironically consecrated it, far above our poor, like, power to actually add or detract. So the world will little note, nor , like, long remember what we actually say here, but it can never forget what they actually did here. Like, it is for us the living, rather, to be actually dedicated here to the ironically unfinished work which, like, they who actually fought here, like, have thus far so nobly advanced, actually. So it is rather for us to be here actually dedicated to the great iconic task actually remaining, like, before us -- that ironically from these honored dead, like, we take, like, increased devotion to that iconic cause for which they actually gave the, like, last full iconic measure of devotion -- that actually we here highly resolve that these, like, dead shall actually not have ironically died in vain -- that this iconic nation, like, actually under God, shall ironically have a new birth of freedom – and, like, that government of the, like, people, actually by the people, ironically for the iconic people, shall not, like, actually perish from the sustainably managed earth.

Abraham Lincoln
November 19, 2019
Note to secretary: Make three copies and scan to the teleprompter. Send one copy to legal department re the possibility of residuals. Don’t mention the Russians.