The Tweet of the Year goes to James Buchanan.
I learned a history today thanks to this lovely tweet.
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Honestly everyone involved is lucky there wasn’t a war. The most notable instance of a noble falling into poop (literally, at least) was the Defenestration of Prague which began the Thirty Years War.
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I’m not a Taft stan but I still feel seen.
My favorite thing about this: while I was learning about the Thirty Years War a few months back, I landed here:
In 2020, you might say “fuck around and find out”.
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Dead President Twitter has now expanded into an alt history where Walter Mondale won against Reagan and I’m very here for this new form of Dead President Roleplay.
Link to the account:
https://twitter.com/POTUSMondale
Portraits of public figures as they’re seen instead of how they look are really not common enough these days. Even the most savage political cartoonist today doesn’t do this kind of visual distortion to get at the horrific nightmare we live in. I can really only get this fix because Ralph himself is still alive and releases art like this about Trump and our era every once in a while.
Eli Valley is pretty prolific but I agree that we’re in a dearth of caricaturists.
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If Garrison-esque Eli “Oops I dropped a pot of ink in a pile of spaghetti” Valley is the best we’ve got for caricaturists, we’re not in dearth, we’re in a death, and way past the actual dying, it’s into some real Pet Sematary type shit.
Stand up comedy is usually described as coming out of vaudeville theater companies in the late 19th century, but the first person to use self deprecating humor to build trust with an audience and mask a deep insecurity was a man named Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865). His early career was as a lawyer, something he shares with Blazing Saddles screenwriter Norman Steinberg, he started doing gigs around Illinois. His Senatorial campaign, which would inspire future comedians like Stephen Colbert and Ron White to run for office, began with a gig in Decatur where he was so popular he crowd surfed to the stage. The campaign featured five memorable roast battles with Stephen A Douglass. Sadly his career was cut short in 1865 at Ford’s Theater when a rival actor devastated him, and his replacement wasn’t so much a comedian as a clown.
SOURCES:
Shenk, Joshua Wolf. Lincoln’s Melancholy How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatness. Paw Prints, 2008.
“I Want Sandwiches, I Want Chicken.” Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, Dir. Jerry Seinfeld, Netflix, 2012
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A day worth remembering
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It lasted three days, this year falling on a Friday through Sunday. John Brown died for the sins of this guilty land to be purged with blood.
Random Twitter porn bot says hang Jeff Davis from a sour apple tree? I’ll take it.
So I get why Kids These Days think that America was demonizing the Viet Cong without remorse, but I wish people would get that there is a long long long lineage of their movement that has been stronger in the past than it is now. For instance, this comic was nationally syndicated in newspapers and was printed in the “Funnies” on a weekday.
I wish our political tropes still had imagery for shorthands. “The Housewife from Akron Ohio” of the Nixon era was no less of a denial of minorities and dissenters as Americans than “Middle America” but she’s a character I can then use for all sorts of fun stories that subvert her iconography.
For those not familiar with this moment in political commentary in 1970 (can’t blame you, I’m not sure why I keep thinking about it), she was a middle aged woman who’s afraid of how her family is being torn apart be the rapid change of society, wishing that her son could still talk to his dad, voting Nixon in the hopes she could have healthy relationships again. The kind of woman who’d abused the Mothers Little Helpers that got rebranded to Xanax and are popular again today. Naturally, I like to think she found love in another Housewife from Akron Ohio because that’s such a fun little way to subvert the Conservative fear it’s built in.
I dunno how well this fits into this thread, but it’s Nixon related and I’m having fun thinking about it.
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I distinctly remember being shown a movie in highschool that was this pitch as an anthology. Like, a bunch of connected plots about housewives dealing with their alienation by having lesbian awakenings.
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I feel like this is the place to share the thesis statement of my essay for school that I had to water down but I am holding onto for future use.
"Between 1789 and 1860, Federal Assemblies repeatedly denied the self-evident truth that all men were created equal”
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I’ve been thinking about Elvis Presley a lot and with the new biopic out I figured now is as good a time as any to post about it. The thing about Elvis is his place in culture is larger than any of his actual artistic achievements. Even using that apocryphal claim that he “invented rock and roll” doesn’t quite do justice to what he meant to America. Elvis’s famous innocence in the 1950s and early 60s, decline into drug abuse and erratic behavior in the mid and late 60s, and eventual death in 1977 resonated with how a certain segment of the population viewed America as a whole, and Elvis became latched onto as a symbol of our national loss of innocence. So for this post, I’m going to ignore his actual artistic achievements and pitfalls and just focus on his role in American myth,
However, having recently read Peter Guralnik’s exhaustive (and exhausting) biography of Elvis Pressley, it felt to me that his innocence was stunted emotional growth. His naivete about his dancing controversies, his attachment to his mother late in life, and his relationship with Priscilla beginning when she was just 14 and he was already 24, are all red flags for a deeply emotionally stagnated person. I will not psychoanalyze to the point of trying to pinpoint a cause for this, but to say he struggled to grow up is a pretty clear deduction from the facts.
This “innocence” relies completely on what was socially idolized by the Overton Window of the 1950s. It was not a healthy outlook for an individuals development. And in an odd way, this is a fair assessment of the 1950s as a whole. Their standards of that era and what was acceptable or unaccepted bred a dogma of conformity that oppressed just about every minority you can think of and disregarded their pleas for a better condition. Elvis was not unaffected by this. In his early relationships, he would be caustic or abusive to his girlfriends around friend because he was afraid to show weakness, occasionally pulling her into another room for a beating and then using that opportunity to apologize for what he “had to” do in front of his friends. There was also the occasion on which he nibbled a female reporters finger, which was and has continued to be dismissed as an “innocent” expression of affection. (My source for all this is the first volume of the Guralnik biography, which disturbingly puts positive spins on all these things.)
These were issues that had to be rectified, and as a symbol of that pure 1950s Americana, I can hardly mourn his descent into severe mental illness in the 1960s, even though I would never wish what he went through on any human being including Elvis Presley. The old ways weren’t just flawed, they were destructive to the majority of Americans. They needed to die for society to progress. Nevertheless, the way we talk about his descent always mirrors that particular strain of culture that views America’s last days of greatness being the days before JFK died, before the uppity peak of the Civil Rights Movement, before subversive queers were bold enough to be seen, and before those hippies dared disrespect the President for murdering children (I hope the satire is palpable here). It’s not that I don’t lament the suffering of another human being, but the parallels are too strong to disregard for someone this iconic, and even discussions of this period of his life frequently tie back to that “innocence” that I struggle to find innocent.
His continued descent into the 70s is truly one of the saddest, most pitiful stories to happen to a rock star. But still, the way we talk about his death is more aggressive at painting him as a symbol than discussions of any other period. In Post-Watergate America, we had “lost our way,” and Elvis’s death symbolized the death of the nation that people had loved in the 50s – the same nation that enabled domestic abuse, a racial caste system, et al, and the same person who had dated a middle schooler as an adult. I do not think Elvis or America ever “lost their way.” I think we and Elvis had to reckon with demons that had been bogging us our whole lives, and neither of us were able to.
Let us move on from Elvis. Let us move on from fetishization of the 1950s. Let us recognize this nostalgia for the reactionary force it has been and how much more potent it is now that it has fermented for decades. Let us celebrate the brave people who stood up against the very forces that we currently romanticize, and let us emulate them to build a brighter future.
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