I love you Sarah Vowell. You are awesome in a geeky, "I like knowing things" sort of way. I think it's great that you would orchestrate vacation times around visiting places of note for presidential assassinations. I'm jealous I didn't think of it myself.
Anyway these are the parts of your book that I want to remember verbatim ...
"Until that moment, I hadn't realized that I embarked on the project of touring historic sites and monuments having to do with teh assassinations of Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley right around the time my country iffily went to war, which is to say right around the time my resentment of the current president cranked up into contempt. Not that I want the current president killed. Like that director, I will, for the record (and for the FBI agent assigned to read this and make sure I mean no harm - hello there), clearly state that while I am obsessed with death, I am against it.
Like director Tim Douglas, my simmering rage against the current president scares me. I am a more or less peaceful happy person whose lone act of violence as an adult was shoving a guy who spilled beer on me at a Sleater-Kinney concert. So if I can summon this much bitterness toward a presidential human being, I can sort of, kind of see how this amount of bile, or more, teaming up with disappointment, unemployment, delusions of grandeur and mental illness, could prompt a crazier narcissistic creep to buy one of this country's widely available handguns. Not that I, I repeat, condone that. Like Lincoln, I would like to believe the ballot is stronger than the bullet. Then again, he said that before he got shot.
I am only slightly less astonished by the egotism of the assassins, the inflated self-esteem it requires to kill a president, than I am astonished by the men who run for president. These are people who have the gall to believe they can fix us -- us and oure deficit, our fossil fuels, our racisim, poverty, potholes and public schools. The egomania required to be president or a presidential assassin makes the two types brothers of sorts. Presidents and presidential assassins are like Las Vegas and Salt Lake City that way. Even though one city is all about sin and the other is all about salvation, they are identical, one-dimensional company towns bult up out of the desert by the sheer will of true believers. The assassins and the presidents invite the same basic question: Just who do you think you are?"
From Edwin Markham's poem "Lincoln, Man of the People"
As when a lordly cedar, green with boughs,
Goes down with a great shout upon the hills,
And leaves a lonesome place against the sky.
From Garfield's commencement address at Hiram College 1880
It has occured to me that the thing you have, that all men have enough of, is perhaps the thing that you care for the least, and that is your leisure -- the leisure you have to think; the leisure you have to be let alone; the leisure you have to throw the plummet into your mind, and sound the depth and dive for things below.
From Louis Sullivan's 1924 autobiography
In a land declaring its fervid democracy, its inventiveness, its resourcefulness, its unique daring, enterprise and progress th;us did the virus of a culture, snobbish and alien to the lan, perform its work of disintigration; and thus ever works the pallid academic mind, denying the real, exalting the fictitious and the false, incapable of adjusting itself to the flow of living things, to the reality and the pahtos of man's follies, to the valiant hope that ever causes him to aspire, and again to aspire; that never lifts a hand in aid because it cannot... when what the world needs is courage, common sense and human sympathy, and a moral standard that is plain, valid and livable.
There were more, but the bookmarkers got mixed up.
The Kitchen: Three Years Later
9 years ago
