How To Fight Presidents

"The desire to be president is a currently undiagnosed but very specific form of insanity. Only a person with an unfathomably huge ego and an off-the-charts level of blind self-confidence and an insatiable hunger for control could look at America, in all of her enormity, with all of her complexity, with all of her beauty and flaws and strength and power, and say, "Yeah. I should be in charge of that." Only a lunatic would look at a job where you get slandered and scrutinized and attacked by the media and sometimes even assassinated and say, 'Sign me up!'"
--Daniel O'Brien, How to Fight Presidents: Defending Yourself Against the Badasses Who Ran This Country

The worst aspect of school is that I don't get much time to read for pleasure. I mean, I do still read for pleasure. I just feel guilty about it in a way that I didn't before.

With How To Fight Presidents, Cracked's Dan O'Brien has constructed a better written, more entertaining counterpoint to Christopher Hitchens' assertion about voters getting the mad, narcissistic politicians they deserve. Not in the sense that Hitchens was wrong, just that we might as well embrace the inevitable. As long as this land has a job with that much responsibility and people who are "crazy ambitious and obsessed with power to an unhealthy degree," this is the system we're going to have. Not that this is always a good thing--and O'Brien is quick to lambast the likes of Van Buren, Fillmore, and Buchanan--but at least it's sometimes an entertaining thing. In the long run. You know, after we've had time to process their horrific insanity.

Unfortunately, that process takes so long that by the time we've done it, we've also thoroughly sanitized these men (all men, so far--I wonder if part of the appeal of a female president is to see if the insanity manifests any differently). By the time we're ready to learn about an historic figure, we've eliminated all of the worthwhile information, shamefully cutting the most savory chunks of history from our cultural awareness. By bringing tidbits such as Zachary Taylor's bizarre cherry-fueled death to the masses in digestible form, O'Brien is truly doing the Lord's work.

O'Brien highlights a lot of facts about presidents that the dutiful nerd already knows. Like Andrew Jackson's crazed duel lust (that is, a lust for dueling and violence more generally). Or William Howard Taft and the bathtub. Or the fact that Teddy Roosevelt was basically President Batman, while his fifth cousin, Franklin Delano, was Iron Man (making James Madison... Ant Man? O'Brien never says).

However, I was less familiar with Calvin Coolidge's Norman Batesian disposition. Or John Quincy Adams' disturbing fondness for literal self-flagellation. And while I could've surmised LBJ's dick-centric egotism (who couldn't have?), O'Brien presents a few juicy more details to back that up (okay, I'll give you one: Johnson would casually pee on secret service agents' legs when it was a convenient solution).

If any of these revelations are surprising, it's only because of the aforementioned sanitized history that we were all fed in school. We get the dull falsehood about George Washington and the cherry tree, not the discomforting admission that Washington enjoyed being shot at while in battle. This is the most demanding, scrutinized, personally devastating job on the planet and not only do these men think they can do the job, they think they can get a majority of the electorate to agree with them.

Presidents are insane. We need them to be or we'd have no one else willing to do the job. It's our solemn, patriotic duty to enjoy the ride.

Grade: A-