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-

Two Half-Drunken Years

This past Sunday was the 75th birthday of the world's greatest fictional character. Two days later, I mark a somewhat less momentous occasion for a somewhat less momentous creation: the second anniversary of this here blog-space.

My second year was not as fruitful as my first (a snap presidential election would help me out, if anyone knows how to get one of those off the ground), but there were a few good posts, I think. Right? No? Well, here are some highlights, anyway:

• That time Time told millennials, "nyeh-nyeh, I'm not touching you!" 
• The Student Loans Grotesque, a piece that was at least as disheartening to write as it is to read.
• When I unfairly tried to apply the D&D alignment chart to The Wire.
• Nine Billion Copies!, in which I brooded over the slow burn of self-publishing. I posted a spiritual follow-up on that theme a few weeks ago.
• On Anglophilia, a self-reflection. 
• My semi-insidery coverage of last year's asinine government shutdown (remember that?) and the follow-up about Washington receiving shit for the things the people's representatives do with their 90% reelection rates. 
• Bat-Affleck, my much-too-rushed appraisal of the Batman casting, which, as far as we know, might actually be the best part of that movie. 
• And my unrealistically optimistic attempt to reason with the get-off-my-lawnism plaguing a generation of child athletes. That one also got a follow-up.

What a strange, meandering year it's been. Let us never speak of it again. 

One last thing: aois21 publications--my new marketing guys--have themselves a Kickstarter campaign to expand their business helping self-published authors and launch a couple of journals. Go help them out, it'll be fun.

The Cubs Are The Reason I Drink... In The Summer

This winter has been horrifying. I usually like winter (I never got on well with hot weather), but goddamn if the last few months haven't been unapologetically awful. Not only has it sucked, it's still going. But now we have baseball back. And baseball thaws out winter. Not literally, of course. I've been to at least one game during which the wind chill was hovering in the mid 30s. And I was sitting in the upper deck. And it started raining as I was leaving the stadium after a drizzly, lifeless 2-0 Cubs loss.

Speaking of whom...

The Cubs have a second straight first year manager. There have been some injuries. And they've fallen back to 23rd on the payroll rankings, which doesn't mean anything on its own except that we can probably expect an even longer rebuilding process as they bring guys up through the system. The most exciting thing about 2014 will be Wrigley's 100th birthday. Love the park all you want (I do), but the stadium should not be the most exciting aspect of your franchise for the better part of the last century. I'll be happy if the Cubs top 70 wins. On the other hand, I chose Pittsburgh on a lark last year and it worked pretty well for them. So it can't hurt. Anyway, there are literally zero consequences for being wrong here. I could have the Cleveland Spiders win the AL West, if I wanted. Or the Montreal Alouettes. And nobody could do a thing about it. 

• NL East: Washington
• NL Central: Chicago 
• NL West: Los Angeles
• NL Wild Cards: St. Louis, Atlanta
• AL East: Boston 
• AL Central: Kansas City
• AL West: Cleveland Spiders
• AL Wild Cards: Oakland, Texas 
• World Series: Los Angeles over Boston 

By the way, love baseball's slow embrace of 20th Century technology. In another fifty years maybe we'll finally have the robo-umpires we should've had in 2010. And they'll all look like Bud Selig.

New Stores Now Open

As promised, Nos Populus is now available at a much wider array of stores. You can find the list over there on the right. But if you're like me and the distinction between left and right eludes you (and frankly seems arbitrary, anyway), here's the master list:

Amazon (for paperback and Kindle)
aois21 (for paperback and e-book)
Barnes & Noble (for Nook)
Google Books (for e-book) and also available at Google Play
Kobo (for e-book)
Smashwords (for e-book)

The iBookstore will have it available soon, as well.

Barnes & Noble provides a really nice preview sample (all bright and shiny, with words you can read and such), and you can find more of those here and here. You can check out more about the inspiration of and influences on Nos Populus (as well as James Reso's vampiric qualities) here. You can read about my alma mater's complicated influence (and the slow deterioration of my fondness for politics) here. And the origins of President Dennis Ward here. You can also click the "Nos Populus" tag below for more.

I know I've been writing about my book a lot the last few weeks. I don't usually mean to be this self-indulgent, but the aois21 deal made a lot of things happen very quickly and I wanted to get the word out while that was still hot. Fresh material is on the way, I promise. In the meantime...

St. Paddy's 2014

I'm susceptible to cultural cringe from any number of directions, but the reinforcin' o' the stereotypes remains particularly galling.

I once said that "if you're the type to hit up an Irish pub on St. Paddy's, you're begging for an underwhelming night (you may also be a tool)." That last bit may have been harsh since, if you've attempted to engage an Irish bar on St. Patrick's Day (or in the preceding weekend, as the calendar has conspired to do this year--we can't all live in Boston), you've suffered enough without being called names.

Why do we require such a thin excuse in order to get plastered? We're adults--if we want to knock back a few at 11am on March 17th, let's go for it. But that's socially unacceptable unless we can peg it to a reason--holidays, weddings, not guilty verdicts, etc. The temperance movement may have lost, but it managed to leave behind acres of bad wiring in our cultural brain. It's a complicated relationship, but that's probably unavoidable. We're talking about a substance that tastes great and makes us feel temporarily invulnerable, before occasionally destroying us. In deference to that, let's acknowledge that hanging our binge drinking urge on a civilization that was partially devastated (and partially saved) by booze may be something like tempting fate. At the very least, and especially if you know you're a lightweight, don't pretend to be Irish while you're coughing up that half-curdled carbomb. It's embarrassing for everyone.

But I don't want to be gloomy on St. Patrick's Day. I really don't. To that end, I was happy to read that Sam Adams, Heineken, and Guinness (along with some local politicians) have pulled out of parades in New York and Boston today on the grounds that the Irish dons' long-standing stonewalling of the LBGT community is disgusting. Which it is. Check out the pious statement from the organizers of the Boston parade: "we must maintain our guidelines to insure the enjoyment and public safety of our spectators." As though anyone has ever enjoyed a parade. Anyway, this basic recognition of human decency seems a small thing, after an historic last few years for gay equality. But after such tidal waves, we may now have to measure these things in the micro-sense. And each one of those small things will be reason enough to hoist a pint. Or three.