The President Abraham Lincoln 12" poseable action figure in period attire and equipped with a display stand, available for near-on $30 at the Gettysburg National Military Park Visitor Centre, is saying something. Staring out beyond the transparent acrylic, painted black eyes focussed to a point somewhere just beyond your left shoulder, his face is moulded to exhibit the same patient stoicism with which he looked into Mathew Brady’s camera in the dark days of 1864, and with which, we would like to imagine, he signed the 13th Amendment. While this particular model does not contain the standard Read Only Memory voice box from which the Gettysburg Address may be transmitted at the customer’s will, the face is reassuring, the expression looks authentic. Those lines of fatigue carved by four bloody years are etched very nicely here: they’re just like the daguerreotype, just like the five dollar bill, just like the original man. Who wouldn’t want to take an Abraham Lincoln home from Gettysburg? Who wouldn’t want to collect another likeness from the very place those furrows in his brow got deeper, the very site on which he charged the American nation with a curious kind of living commemoration?  (more...)