This paranoid looking man was Mallard Feelmore, number 13. He was born in upstate New York, in a log cabin which he built with his own hands, His beginnings were humble, as his first job was in landscape maintenance at a cemetery. However, he soon had a lot of people under him, even then.
Even though he was number 13, Feelmore was never elected. He was the bottom half of the Whig ticket in 1848, and stepped up to the top spot only after number 12 died unexpectedly of terminal flatulence.
Feelmore was not a bad person, but he proved to be unequal to the task, mainly because he was a centrist, which is sometimes also called "moderate," "ruling from the middle," and other silly veshches of that sort. There was then, as there is now, this unfounded and superstitious belief that placing oneself in some mythological "middle" of an unbridgeable gap is virtuous, right, pure, good, true, and all that pollyanna rot and vapid silliness.
The reality was that Mallard Feelmore refused to take a stand in the war that was brewing between the slave states and the free states, or more precisely, between the slavery lovers and the slavery haters. This was unfortunate, since the slavery lovers were evil, and the slavery haters were, if not good, not evil. But Mallard Feelmore was not perceptive enough to figure this out. He believed everyone has a right to his or her opinion, however perverse, cruel, unjust, anti-factual, wrong-headed, stupid, and evil that opinion may be. He was a very weak person.
He was very poor at the job, number 13 was. I guess nobody told him that 13 is an inauspicious number. But as it turned out, he was not as bad as number 14, a drunken Democrat for whom every day was a bad hair day, and also a very weak individual, or number 15, a mediocrity so unperceptive and obtuse that he seemed barely conscious much of the time.
Number 16, of course, was Lincoln, who was a revolutionary. He was probably not a revolutionary when he took office, but had become one by the time he spoke at Gettysburg, in the wake of that enormous blood sacrifice to extirpate the Devil and all his works from American politics and daily life. For unlike numbers 13, 14, and 15, Lincoln understood that he was dealing not with two equally-weighted and legitimate points of view, but with a fight to the death between good and evil.
Will Obama be able to do the same? Will we? Stay tuned.
3 comments:
Is that picture where advertising photographers got that idea for those yucky photographs of women looking at something far to one side? Those eye whites make for an ugly appearance in those ads.
I think the photographer (Matthew Brady, if I'm not mistaken) just thought the three-quarters angle would be the most flattering way to shoot Fillmore, who was both skinny and flabby.
He had thin arms and legs, but a pot belly and collapsed throat. He was not in very good shape, but in those days people didn't live very long or know how to take care of themselves. They were still suffering the shock of the first 100 years of the modern industrial era, with its sedentary habits (only for the bourgeois) and bad food.
Good info.
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