JOSH L. DICKEY encounters his hero, Abraham Lincoln, through the lens of a cartoon purchased in China.
Abraham Lincoln, Made in China
Where it applies to a box of crayons or a plastic fire truck, "Made in China" fails to register with me anymore.
American history is another matter.
A colleague dropped an unopened DVD on my desk a few weeks ago with Abraham Lincoln's face -- rendered as a poorly drawn cartoon -- staring back. The packaging was marked entirely in Chinese; clearly, this was not meant as an export item.
But what resonance could Lincoln possibly have in China?
Were faint notions being twisted into some kind of camp superhero? Was his likeness -- unrecognizable to a foreign culture, for all I knew -- being applied to some ridiculous soap-opera character?
Thanks to the disc's English voiceover option, the answer was none of the above, I was pleased (if somewhat ashamed of myself) to discover. It was nothing more than a bland history lesson.
But what struck me during the roughly 20-minute, anime-style cartoon was the gulf of disparity between obscure truths and jaw-dropping inaccuracies.
On the one hand, the disc opens with Lincoln being mule-kicked as a boy; when he miraculously awakens from what seemed a death blow, he finishes the sentence that flying hooves had cut short the day before. Later, entire segments are devoted to his early politicking, when building infrastructure and opposition to the Mexican War were his platform. True stories, sure -- but hardly the stuff our American history books put front and center.
On the other hand, 'toon Lincoln is a vehement abolitionist from a young age, a position the narrator posits as the reason for his rise to national prominence. Of all the misunderstandings about Lincoln's nuanced views on slavery, this may be the most common. But still: How could the details be so painstakingly right, and the most critical theme so egregiously wrong?
Other things border on the unintentionally funny, if not culturally fascinating: The narrator sounds faintly Australian or Kiwi; the voice of Lincoln, a master storyteller and orator, is weak, awkward and lifeless; and the face of a former slave who thanks Lincoln as he enters a burning Richmond is distinctly Asian.
What this cross-cultural funhouse mirror tells us about the intent of its creators or the unseen faults in the foundations of recorded history, I cannot say. Its shortcomings are harmless enough, and it seems an earnest effort to present the truth.
This much, I'm certain, is true: A history buff, somewhere in China, is having the same thoughts about an American-made documentary on the Great Wall or the Ming Dynasty. I can feel it.
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See the video here.
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The "L" in asap sections editor Josh L. Dickey's byline stands for "Lincoln." Seriously.
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