For one who chronicles fictional apocalypse Ballard retains a jolly sense of humour

For one who chronicles fictional apocalypse, Ballard retains a jolly sense of humour. His most discomforting novel, Crash, suggested a sexuality of the road accident. The recent Christmas edition of Private Eye identified him as a "fruity old perve" Certainly J G Ballard is a wayward spirit. OVER the three decades of his writing career, James Graham Ballard has been called many things: a visionary science fiction stylist, a literary saboteur, a hoodlum scientist. The Republicans traded Lincoln to the Democrats three decades ago and have tried to appropriate the pragmatism of Harry Truman in return ever since. Lincoln may at least help to return the debate to a higher plane.Albert Scardino won a Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing on the Georgia Gazette, 1984; in 1990-91 he was Press Secretary to New York Mayor David Dinkins.. Instead, the goal identified by today's Republican leaders in the national legislature involves the critical issue debated by Lincoln and Douglas in l858, "States' rights" and racial mixing.Lincoln's ideas have fallen into such obscurity that few Americans paid much notice last autumn when General Colin Powell, on announcing that he would not become a Presidential candidate, pledged instead to work to restore balance to the Republican Party, "the party of Lincoln," he said Powell will have to start from scratch.

The ambition is to roll back the clock, not to the issues seemingly resolved in the Civil Rights era of the 1960s, not to those argued and settled in the reforms of the Great Depression, not even to the battle over the income tax that confronted the nation after the turn of the century. He recognised such sophistry as little more than a defence of the locally powerful against the permanently deprived. Today, reactionary forces in Congress are assaulting the social security system, the income tax and federal support of education, the arts, scientific research, transport and weather forecasting. A series of Republican victories followed, right up to 1994.The cries of today's young Republican Congressmen for a dismantling of centralised authority would have brought Lincoln to the edge of despair, just as similar arguments did 150 years ago. Even that statute was assumed to be only a milestone on the road to a civilisation where race and religion and national origin would no longer matter in affairs of government.Instead, that year marked the beginning of a wholesale retreat from Lincoln's victory. Within months of the adoption of the Voting Rights law, Richard M Nixon laid out his Southern Strategy to reach the White House by capturing the white vote. His "strategy" was little more than a race-based populism borrowed from the demagogy of Alabama's Governor George Wallace.

After all, Lincoln is far more than just an historical figure. His war against disunion and in favour of liberty went on for many generations after his death. Not until 1965, exactly 100 years after his assassination, did Congress pass the Voting Rights Act, the law intended to end generations of local and state manipulation that had neutralised the ballot power American black people had won at the end of slavery. Like Lincoln himself, "a house divided..." took on significance when the issues of the day rose to match the language and style he had evolved.Helpful as this might be to students of 19th-century America, the broader contribution of Donald's work comes from the reminder to the current generation of his countrymen that Abe Lincoln cared passionately about public service and about his obligations to the weakest. "How hard, oh how hard it is to die and leave one's Country no better than if one had never lived for it," he said to his law partner after an early (and temporary) loss of political office.

Many anti-slavery advocates adopted it for their speeches years before Lincoln even joined the cause. Southerners remembered it well two years later as a warning to prepare for war after he was elected President, though Lincoln declared repeatedly that he had no intention of initiating such a conflict. But Lincoln had experimented with the "house divided" phrase for 15 years, first in arguing for party solidarity in local politics. His two-man law firm of the 1840s "had no filing cabinets and no files.