Godfather II, New Years, the Shah, Emancipation & Redeeming Time

on January 1, 2014

One of the best New Year’s Eve parties ever is the Godfather II scene when Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista announces to a ballroom of celebrants that he’s resigning as Fidel Castro approaches Havana. Even before the announcement concludes the panicked revelers in their evening clothing and costumes are streaming out the presidential palace doors into the streets, hurrying for their yachts at the harbor. They now plan to spend New Year’s Day back in Florida. The party scene is a fictionalized portrayal of Batista’s hasty departure from Cuba on New Year’s Day 1959.

Another somewhat memorable New Years is Jimmy Carter’s evening with the Shah of Iran in 1977. In his Teheran toast to the Shah, Carter recalled asking his wife, “‘With whom would you like to spend New Year’s Eve?'” And she said, ‘Above all others, I think, with the Shah and Empress Farah.'”

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Thanks to the “great leadership of the Shah,” Carter gushed, Iran was an “island of stability in one of the more troubled areas of the world,” which was “great tribute to you, Your Majesty, and to your leadership and to the respect and the admiration and love which your people give to you.” Calling his friendship “irreplaceable,” Carter hailed the Shah as the “leader with whom I have a deeper sense of personal gratitude and personal friendship.”

Just over a year later, the Shah was overthrown by Ayatollah Khomeini’s Islamist revolution, as Carter initially hesitated to allow him into America for cancer treatment, later forcing him out after Iran seized U.S. diplomats.

Both the Shah and Batista were replaced by murderous tyrannies exponentially greater than their own, regimes that today still repress their people and vex the world.

There was a far more noble New Year’s Day 151 years ago when Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, which eventually freed the slaves. Months before he had told his cabinet that he had promised God he would do so when possible. Having spent New Year’s Day shaking hundreds of hands at a White House open house, Lincoln paused before signing, massaging his hands, not wanting posterity to think a shaky signature indicated reluctance. He knew history would see this day and this act as his defining moment. Of course he was correct, although yet ahead were hundreds of thousands of more Civil War deaths, Lincoln’s own assassination, and delayed legal equality for freed slaves that took a century to repair.

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Every New Years is full of ominous possibility and hope. With what combination will this year combine evil with good or the gray in between? History and God will judge us all, individuals and nations, this year and beyond based on our decisions, motives and actions.

Regrettably the wonderful old hymn “Once to Every Man and Nation,” by the 19th Century abolitionist James Russell Lowell, no longer appears in the United Methodist Hymnal. But its opening words are pertinent for New Years:

Once to every man and nation
Comes the moment to decide,
In the strife of truth with falsehood,
For the good or evil side;
Some great cause, God’s new Messiah,
Offering each the bloom or blight,
And the choice goes by for ever
‘Twixt that darkness and that light.

I think one reason it was removed was concern over its implication that there is only one chance to choose. But Lowell was emphasizing the urgency of every moment. Time passes speedily. As the sun dial outside Tara in “Gone With the Wind” warned: “Do not squander time. That is the stuff life is made of.”

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  1. Comment by Don Creamer on January 2, 2014 at 6:41 pm

    Uh, the Emancipation Proclamation freed no slaves under Union control. It freed no slaves in four slave states that were not in rebellion and Tennessee thus exempting over 100,000 slaves. It only “freed” the slaves in area where Lincoln had no control. Slavery was not made illegal by this document. Please, read it! If what Lincold did achieved anything approaching what you stated, then why did we need the 13th Amendment? Slavery didn’t end in the United States until December of 1865. Otherwise, your article was good.

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