Myth, Revisited: 1860 Race, 2008 Style

[February 01, 2008]  SPRINGFIELD (AP) -- It's edging toward the end of another long night of election coverage, and Tim Russert appears weary. "Four candidates in the most dangerously regional and divisive election in American history," he says, his voice dripping with the calibrated gravitas so at home on TV news. "What a mess."

This is not the usual kind of presidential campaign for Russert, one of America's most recognizable news faces. Despite his decidedly 21st-century suit, red power tie and cutting-edge technological trappings, Russert is covering a 19th-century election -- the 1860 campaign -- as if it were a product of the modern media age. Talk about creative anachronism.

The quixotic approach comes to you from the silky-smooth, Disney-influenced Abraham Lincoln Presidential Museum in Springfield, which enlisted Russert for its unusual case study in mythmaking.

Once you get past the entertaining slickness, the question at hand has to be this: Why? The answer's just as obvious: Without the comfort zone and packaging that modern production values provide, we simply won't pay attention -- to our presidential candidates or just about anything else.

Wherever you go these days, the line between entertainment and education is growing ever more gossamer. Whether it's an amusement park in Missouri that presents the 1880s to you in theme-park style, a movie like "The Gangs of New York" or the multimedia ministrations of Walt Disney World's takes on yesteryear America, history is becoming anecdote.

The Lincoln museum is a working laboratory of this principle. Its scholarship is meticulous, yet it relies on Hollywood packaging techniques to deliver its message.

In the case of Russert's "newscast," visitors traveling through a landscape of Lincoln artifacts both real and reconstructed suddenly find themselves in a dark room filled with television production machinery.

You hear a producer's voice, all crispness and deadlines: "Cam 1, Cam 2, graphics ... We are back in five, four, three ..." The monitors -- nine of 'em -- show Russert, the cued-up video and the graphics. Another control panel, running Windows XP, displays a waveform of an upcoming soundbite.

A crawl at the bottom of the screen offers, insistently: "Frenchman Louis Pasteur claims that boiling milk kills what he calls `germs,' invisible agents that cause illness. American physicians call Pasteur a quack." And the campaign ads: John Bell calling for calm. John C. Breckinridge on the attack. And Abraham Lincoln, riffing off his speech about a house divided, promising to put our house in order.

Yes, a museum must make history come alive. But in the process, the myth of the presidency and the country that produced it are elevated even further into legend.

Consider John Wilkes Booth, who slipped into a theater box on April 14, 1865, and took Lincoln's life with a derringer to the back of the head. The museum has a figure of Booth lurking menacingly outside the White House gate, leaning against a pillar as another period figure, Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, looks on matter-of-factly. Sure, the White House was more accessible then, but the rebel-yell Booth wasn't exactly hobnobbing with the guy who won the war for the Union.

Or the background music that takes you through the Civil War with Lincoln: There's the "Battle Hymn of the Republic," of course, and "When Johnny Comes Marching Home" -- but also "Amazing Grace," creating a leitmotif that equates the fallen Lincoln with pure holiness.

Relics are presented like shards of bone from the saints -- an old spoon, a shingle, wood from his front door, a funeral ticket. In fact, the re-creation of Lincoln lying in state is so convincing that you feel you should be quiet and respectful in the presence of a corpse that isn't there, a death you never endured.

The building of presidential mythology in America is like standing at the Xerox machine and making multiple generations of the same copy -- each copy is progressively less detailed than the previous one, until the blacks and whites predominate and the grays are faded and unrecognizable.

But the Russert anachronism does something else, too, in its innovative building of mythical "news coverage." While entertaining, and laudable in how it hews to the facts, it inadvertently promulgates a more insidious message -- that without modern packaging and pacing and gadgetry, history is, well, kind of dull.

Nothing could be further from the truth. But in the campaign to package American presidential myth, that may be a battle that's truly yesterday's news.

[Associated Press; By TED ANTHONY

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