National Treasure Book of Secrets and the Christian. Nicholas Cage.
It’s harder to do a review of a movie you didn’t think was particularly good, especially when you didn’t think it was particularly bad. The first 30 minutes of National Treasure: Book of Secrets doesn’t have any action. During that time there are a series of mysteries and codes to unravel, which should be fun, but because you don’t really get access to the codes or the keys, or have the time to try to figure them out, you just watch the cast have a series of epiphanies solving the clues in ways that are not as fun for the audience as they could be.
It makes us feel like we should have a pen and some paper and stop the film every few minutes to try to break the code. But five seconds later somebody just says, “Oh that means da da da.” and the whole thing is over. Do you remember those old Sherlock Holmes stories? If there is really no way that you could have possibly figured out who did it, then it isn’t that fun to find out who did it. Even that isn’t as bad as being able to figure out who did it in the first five minutes and then being bored for the next two hours while what you already know is going to happen happens. NT:BoS Doesn’t fall into those traps but it isn’t quite as good as the first one either.
The movie turns out to be good clean fun and once the action kicks in, paces up a bit. I think kids will like it, and there is a great theme of honour and self-sacrifice that runs through the story like a ribbon of gold. We as a people don’t think this way anymore; in terms of honour and self-sacrifice I mean. We’re too jaded. These are themes we think are over played and better suited to an earlier less cynical age, so we skirt them in our stories. For something to be ‘current’ it needs to be tragic, depression sells better than clarity of moral vision, and anti-heroes that are psychologically compromised or confused about right and wrong are thought of as being more “authentic”. Really, the muddled and ethically ambiguous seldom have the inner strength to do the right thing. It takes great soberness of thought to do right things, and we need to know what is great before we can be it.
National Treasure is strong in the presentation of those traditional; “American” values of creativity, ingenuity, principle, honesty, and family and these also tend to be Christian virtues when interpreted in the right way. After all, people can be very virtuous and honorable for amazingly evil purposes. The ancient Romans were ethically focused upon prudence, courage, loyalty, perseverance, and used this kind of ethical matrix as a means to conquest, murder, enslavement, the glorification of the Roman State, and the Genius of the Emperor. The “Virtues” themselves don’t really ensure any ultimate good because they are value neutral. It’s good to be brave, unless you are evil.
In this, there is a historical thread that courses through the film that brings back the division of North and South in this country. There is a re-enactment of the assassination of Lincoln by John Wilkes Booth that leads to the climax of the story more than a century later. But the men of the South were powerfully motivated men fighting for a cause they thought was just. Doesn’t that absolve them of blame? Well, no. You can’t just fight; you must fight for what is good. The idea that a State’s right to govern itself trumps the individual’s right to be free subverts the very ideas of freedom that justified the establishment of the nation in the first place. First, the person must have a right; they must be “endowed by their Creator” with the inalienable rights of Life, Liberty, and Property. That gives them the right to establish a government best suited to their well being and peace. If they want a small state like Maryland, good for them. If a humongous state like Alaska, so be it. But no one has the right to steal other people from a different continent and to enslave them and their children in perpetuity because they have excess melanin in their skin. That would go against the previous principle that “All men are created equal, and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights…”. You can’t have a right to establish a State without universal human rights, and once you have a right to establish a State, you can’t use it to dis-establish universal human rights, or you are denying that you had the right to form a government in the first place. I know that’s a little confusing but that’s the way it plays out.
These films, National Treasure and National Treasure: Book of Secrets have a deep historical element to them that is part of the fun. I’m for anything that can give kids an interest in history. But the idea that any American State actually had the “right” to practice slavery because it was written into the United States Constitution is, to the Christian mind, ludicrous. The State does not create our Rights, and it cannot take them away. The United States Constitution, then as now, is built on the Authority of the people who vest that authority in a government “of the People, by the People, and for the People…”, but the authority that that government can exercise is limited by the authority that God has given the people that “vest” it. You can’t exercise an authority you don’t have, and neither can a State. Any clause in the American Constitution that justified, protected, or institutionalized slavery was invalid on its face. Those terms of the national contract, unenforceable. States have not been given the authority by God to legitimize evil.
Now, Benjamin Franklin Gates, the Nicholas Cage character in the film, is a Lincoln man, and the heroes in the film take this same tack by affirming the justification of the North in exercising due authority in the preservation of the previously established Union in the face of what the film calls, “traitors”. It’s good to see this coming into the film because most of the rhetoric out there today is pro-Confederate, anti-Lincoln, and irrationally aggressive against historical fact. Some presidential candidates today like Ron Paul are still running on that same anti-Republican (Abraham Lincoln was the first great Republican), Pro-States rights theory that is so anti-American. It is the political theory of the deep South, of the Democratic Party, and of the justification for Slavery. I’m not saying at all that Ron Paul or those that love him are in any way pro-slavery. That is not what I intend at all and would not be true. I’m just saying that the theory that holds that Slavery, or Abortion, or whatever else you might have in mind that is implicitly related to fundamental human rights, is a matter for the States to decide and not a matter of Constitutional law and to be acted on by the Federal Government as well as the divisible States is incoherent and ultimately self defeating. This is why we had the war. The South claimed rights for states that they could never, ever, morally justify.
So all of this is to say, that I liked it. Just not over much because as much as I like the fringe benefits of the movie, the movie itself was only so good. I hope you enjoy it.
In the Lincoln Douglas debates, Senator Douglas set up his most clear and convincing arguments against Lincoln and the Republicans. What He succeeded in doing is showing the people how clearly against traditional American thought and sentiment the pro-slavery movement really was. These are the arguments that turned the tide of the election, against the States Rights South. The Democrats were fighting for a nation that had never existed.
Political Debates Between Lincoln and Douglas.
1897.Speech of Senator Douglas
On the Ooccasion of His Public Reception at Chicago, Friday Evening, July 9, 1858.
(Mr. Lincoln Was Present.)
MR. DOUGLAS said,—
http://www.bartleby.com/251/1002.html
(Douglas attacking Lincoln)
“I will never stop to inquire whether I approve or disapprove of the domestic institutions of a State. I maintain her sovereign rights. I defend her sovereignty from all assault, in the hope that she will join in defending us when we are assailed by any outside power. How are we to protect out sovereign rights to every other State to decide the question for itself. Let Kentucky, or South Carolina, or any other State, attempt to interfere in Illinois, and tell us that we shall establish slavery, in order to make it uniform, according to Mr. Lincolns proposition, throughout the Union; let them come here and tell us that we must and shall have slavery, and I will call on you to follow me, and shed the last drop of our heart’s blood in repelling the invasion and chastising their insolence. And if we would fight for our reserved rights and sovereign power in our own limits, we must respect the sovereignty of each other State.24
Hence, you find that Mr. Lincoln and myself come to a direct issue on this whole doctrine of slavery. He is going to wage a war against it everywhere, not only in Illinois, but in his native State of Kentucky. And why? Because he says that the Declaration of Independence contains this language: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” and he asks whether that instrument does not declare that all men are created equal. Mr. Lincoln then goes on to say that that clause of the Declaration of Independence includes negroes.
I say not. Well, if you say not, I do not think you will vote for Mr. Lincoln. Mr. Lincoln goes on to argue that the language “all men” included the negroes, Indians, and all inferior races. 25
In his Chicago speech he says, in so many words, that it includes the negroes, that they were endowed by the Almighty with the right of equality with the white man, and therefore that that right is divine; a right under the higher law; that the law of God makes them equal to the white man, and therefore that the law of the white man cannot deprive them of that right. This is Mr. Lincoln’s argument. He is conscientious in his belief. I do not question his sincerity; I do not doubt that he, in his conscience, believes that the Almighty made the negro equal to the white man. He thinks that the negro is his brother.
I do not think that the negro is any kin of mine at all. And here is the difference between us. I believe that the Declaration of Independence, in the words “all men are created equal, was intended to allude only to the people of the United States, to men of European birth or descent, being white men; that they were created equal, and hence that Great Britain had no right to deprive them of their political and religious privileges; but the signers of that paper did not intend to include the Indian or the negro in that declaration; for if they had would they not have been bound to abolish slavery in every State and Colony from that day?”
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