Why not bookmark Mike's columns for your weekly enjoyment?

Stimulate the economy, give a poet a dollar.

I enjoyed serving this essay up for you, and I did it for free. But this writer is currently out of work, and a bit of revenue would gladden his heart. If you'd like to contribute to this site, consider dropping a $1 tip in the "Honor Box" here. Just click the CLICK TO PAY image here. Thanks - Mike
"Lots of us find it a very helpful, human, sometimes humorous, always interesting, often surprising column that has no peer on the freelance market, And, yes, you can use that as a testimonial if it helps."
-- Bill Dowd, Albany Times Union

"No one talks about the ups and downs of technology like Michael Finley. See his columns online at www.mfinley.com/. -- James S. Derk, Evansville (IN) Courier

"Editors want everything to fall into a neat little box, and your stuff doesn't do that. You don't write merely about technology, you write about what technology means to us and how it has changed us. I like it." -- John Boxmeyer, St. Paul

Stimulate the economy, give a poet a dollar.

I enjoyed serving this essay up for you, and I did it for free. But this writer is currently out of work, and a bit of revenue would gladden his heart. If you'd like to contribute to this site, consider dropping a $1 tip in the "Honor Box" here. Just click the CLICK TO PAY image here. Thanks - Mike

I especially regret it for Lincoln, who was in some ways the first modern president. His entire life was like a dialogue between the past and the future. He wasn't just born in a log cabin in Kentucky - it was a cabin with only three sides, open on the fourth, with a dirt floor. He went to school for a total of twelve months in his entire life.

The famous tale is of him doing ciphering problems using the face of a wooden shovel, and a chunk of charcoal to write with. Cipher, erase, cipher, erase.

Compare that to today's controversy over allowing calculators in school. Which is no longer a controversy, because we are unwilling to put the frown of trying on our little ones' faces.

Lincoln's campaign materials referred to him as the railsplitter. I have wondered if they seized on that image because it suggested a willingness to split the country in half over slavery. But I am jaded by subliminal advertising, and see suggestions everywhere. He was called that because he spent time doing that - pitting muscle against bone, steel against wood. By the time he was an adult he was made obsolete by steam railsplitters, that could split 200 rails an hour.

Yet old Abe presided over the first modern machine war, in which victory went to the side most adept at mass production, communicating instantaneously via telegraph, advanced supply line coordination, and a kind of high touch -- making the populace of the other side too miserable to continue.

He abhorred that mechanization, especially the technocrats like George McClellan, top general of the Army of the Republic who perfected the science of military logistics but were unable to muster character with six month's notice. Great at marching in formation, but unable to put that splendid machine at risk.

Give Lincoln a man from the heartland like Grant, or himself, someone unaccustomed to urban niceties but who could stare fire in the face and advance. Because pain was the price of useful endeavor.

Before he was elected president, almost everything he tried failed. He was a lousy businessman and a worse farmer. He got beat in his first run at Congress, and in a later bid for the vice presidency. He lost, if you count votes, the Lincoln-Douglas debates. He felt he was losing the war single-handedly the first three years. To citizens of the day he embodied the worst political traits - Reagan's remoteness, Carter's effectiveness, LBJ's cartoon oafishness. Today he would be unelectable. Why vote for a loser, with all the wonderful candidates we have to pick from?

Only in death, as the steam engine carrying Lincoln's coffin chugged across the prairie, returning him to his Illinois soil, did people realize what they had lost - a man who ciphered by hand, and felt each draftee's death as if it were his son Willie's. Millions of people - an astonishing figure for the time -- stood alongside the rail sidings to see his car rumble by.

I wonder, as I sit here pushing buttons and adjusting the system, what Lincoln would make of my world. He and his generation -- all those unsmiling photographs, because people froze their faces for the full 15 seconds exposure required - expected sorrow and drudgery. The value of a thing was established by the difficulty of obtaining it. Today, in the world of daytrading and e-commerce, value is whatever you can get. And good for you if your profit margins are wide and your effort output is low.

It is a question that tugs at me. Here we are, bearing our ancestors' DNA into the future, replicating those grim, suffering figures of the past into the carefree future.

But would they like us? Would Abraham Lincoln approve of the superhuman powers we possess, but the McClellanish way we dither it all away?

Do we do the old ones a favor, planting their stern seed in a future that has no heart for sternness?