SHAWN MACOMBER: Honest Andrew Land of Lincoln: Adventures in Abe's America
Ferguson, Andrew
BOOKS IN REVIEW had to be hit really hard to make it produce the characteristic high-pitched shriek that signaled a successful molding. It did no good to complain to coppersmiths because they...
...We live with that uneasy sensation every day...
...Or maybe a tanner, who wasn’t unusually noisy but who kept big tubs of urine at the ready to treat his hides...
...Nevertheless, those who presume surreal invocations of Lincoln exist strictly in the fictional realm should pick up Andrew Ferguson’s , a strange, funny, modern Lincoln obsessives, himself included...
...The first was Hurricane Katrina...
...BOOKS IN REVIEW reputation for holding things togethername could sit so easily in that would Harry Land of Lincolnactually quite-touching journey into the world of Granted, a wannabe video poker baron is ing of more than fourscore ators at an Association of Lincoln Presenters conference in Santa Museum, whimsically discussing a Lincoln rollertaneous pro- and anti-Lincoln conferences in Richwhile oh-so-sensitive liberals gather to embrace “a . Ithe wit and insight on display in Land of Lincoln Or would it be: “If you want to make Lincoln torn republic found himself in and the situation a running through Central Illinois are lined with ‘Prairie life would have given a thought to Arthur Ashe or his HLand of Lincoln for the supposed willingness when his “vitriol boils ly in person and on their turf...
...I just keep asking myself, ‘What Truman do?’” for example, falls flat...
...Over and over we were told there were no working toilets, that people were using the floors, that the air was fetid and foul...
...Among the many intriguing quotations in this book is one by the 18th-century Scottish philosopher David Hume, who said: “A lack of personal hygiene excites an uneasy sensation in others...
...Or near-simulmond, Virginia, presenting, Ferguson reports, either “a racist, warmongering totalitarian, or a sentimental old poop—Mussolini, on the one hand, or Mister Rogers on the other...
...specifically, the descriptions, compulsively repeated by TV reporters, of the sanitary conditions at the Superdome and Convention Center...
...It’s an unfair assessment, to say the least...
...Stumped...
...In the last two years, two news stories have hit Americans where we live more than all the specials about Iraq, illegal immigration, and Campaign ’08 put together...
...Such is our 16th president’s . What other president’s dialogue...
...The dogskinner down the street was hard at his task of supplying aristocrats who practiced the sport of falconry with meat for their hawks...
...And over here in the blue trunks is a bit from “a grievance tour” Ferguson took with an “Abephobe,” wherein the pair come upon a statue of black tennis star Arthur Ashe that still riles the Sons of Confederate Veterans, “just a few hundred yards down the street from Jefferson Davis, who never in his ancestors, unless he’d been putting in a bid...
...He was bipolar, right...
...And if you think that’s a compliment, please do read Ferguson’s fabulously eviscerating essay on Moyers in his 1996 essay collection, Fools’ Names, Fools’ FacesT IS NO SIMPLE TASK to capture even a fraction of within the confines of a magazine review...
...relevant to a contemporary business audience, you’ve obviously got to find parallels between the situation a commander in chief of a nineteenth-century warmiddle manager in a twenty-first century corporation finds himself in...
...Compelled to offer a representative morsel from, say, Ferguson’s chapter on the popularity of Lincoln business workshops, would you choose this passage: “In our day, the business guru Stephen Covey has identified exactly Seven Habits of Highly Effective People...
...Or how about Bob Rogers, lead designer of the $150 million animatronic, Disney-fied Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and coaster he had considered installing mid-museum...
...The compulsive repetition began again, this time with passengers attempting to describe the smell, and an endless loop of the shot of the aisle that looked just like the descriptions of 18th-century London streets in this book...
...We are aware of our national regression and harbor a deep fear that the country is breaking down...
...In a SEPTEMBER 2007 69 (ATLANTIC MP, 288 Reviewed by Shawn Macomber mist-friendly business—video poker!—Henrickson offers him a small bronze casting of Lincoln...
...Because it’s about us...
...AROLD HOLZER, reviewing Washington Post, decried Ferguson’s over” to “character assassinate...
...Sample morning diner banter: “Normally I wouldn’t sit here...
...Why review a book like Hubbub, written by a British academic, published by a university press, and chock full of scholarly footnotes...
...It did no good to complain to coppersmiths because they were all deaf as posts, but if you managed to get him evicted his lodging might be rented by a knife-sharpener whose daily grind sounded like a thousand fingernails scraping across a blackboard all at once...
...This requires a lot of ingenuity...
...And he knew he couldn’t do it alone...
...We got the point but still they wouldn’t stop...
...they do not include ‘forget to cash your paychecks’ and ‘keep your most important stuff in your hat...
...BOOKS IN REVIEW had to be hit really hard to make it produce the characteristic high-pitched shriek that signaled a successful molding...
...The pig castrator in his protective leather apron was busily hacking off testicles...
...Other than giving us a chance to practice the good-natured schadenfreude that the how-people-lived division of social history offers, what purpose is served by calling it to the attention of a youngish political-magazine audience interested in current events...
...Lincoln had a lot of highs and lows in his life,” Rogers tells Ferguson...
...He tried to hold things together in a time of great change, but he never forgot he was an imperfect human being,” Henrickson, portrayed brilliantly by Bill Paxton, explains...
...You’re right!: The 1860s,” Lincoln who could deal comfortably with ambiguity,” leaving Ferguson to quip, “If Lincoln had been born 125 years later, he could have been Bill Moyers...
...It’s a split decision if there ever was one...
...if they need a dramatic description they will settle for “surreal,” but Katrina correspondents pulled out all the stops...
...In this corner, to illustrate Ferguson’s considerable prowess in unearthing and presenting uniquely telling details, we have this aside from his hilariously heart-warming account of a family sightseeing trip along the now mostly forsaken Lincoln Heritage Trail: “The interstates Grass Preservation Areas,’ patches of ground designated and protected by state bureaucrats as a way of nurturing the weed that their great-grandparents almost killed themselves trying to obliterate...
...They baited people too, which led to the popularization of an elegant item that ironically has come to symbolize this raucous age: the gentleman’s walking stick...
...The uneasy sensation we feel is not fear of another 9/11 per se, but a fear that another 9/11 will be the Day the Plumbing Stopped...
...The average TV reporter shies away from unusual words...
...Our obsessive need to talk about s--t and our compulsion to see it as a symbol of death exposes with merciless clarity what is really on our minds...
...Let’s try another, shall we...
...Americans in the Age of Terrorism live with the dread certainty that one day soon we will be stuck indefinitely in some airport for weeks, with no possibility of showering or even washing, without clean underwear but with diarrhea, our toothbrushes confiscated, and all women forced to surrender every sanitary napkin and tampon they packed so that Security can rip them open to see if there’s anything inside...
...The second news story concerned the plane whose toilet got stopped up and sent “raw sewage,” as it was carefully called, flowing down the aisle for the whole of a trans-Atlantic flight...
...Throughout the book, Ferguson comports himself with a charitable air of gentlemanliness, which is to say, even on those occasions when Ferguson swats at the hubris of one or the eccentricity of another, it is only after having provided them ample opportunity to express their opinions, typicalFools’ Names, Fools’ THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR Land of Lincoln: Adventures in Abe’s America By Andrew Ferguson ONTHLY RESSPAGES, $24...
...polygamist an oddity, but what of a gatherearnest Lincoln impersonClaus, Indiana...
...W HAT, YOU MAY BE ASKING YOURSELF, does all this have to do with 21st-century America...
...Water shortages, low-flow shower heads, sluggish ever-shrinking toilets, blackouts, brownouts, and now food scares that become the subject of two-hour documentaries so that all the reporters get to say “diarrhea” in every other sentence...
...It was “stygian… infernal… spectral… sepulchral...
...I’m not real fond of booths...
...At the anti-Abe conference Ferguson finds a book advertised with the slogan, “You think our problems began in the sixties...
...One 68 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 2007 reporter even called the whole city of New Orleans a “charnel house...
...Live cattle headed for slaughter were “baited,” i.e., harassed by vicious dogs, because it was said to tenderize their meat...
...The dogs weren’t fussy about whose meat they tenderized...
...The refugees were trapped in an “abyss...
...Honest Andrew A RECENT EPISODE of HBO’s critically acO N claimed dramedy Big Love, polygamist Bill Henrickson, rattled by the tough realities of illicitly maintaining three wives, tells a confidant, “I just keep asking myself, ‘What would Abraham Lincoln do?’” A few installments later, when the same confidant gets cold feet about investing in a polygaShawn Macomber is a 2006 Phillips Foundation Journalism fellow...
...Even given the unlikely possibility that your immediate neighbors were quiet, havoc was never far away, usually in the form of agonized howls...
Vol. 40 • September 2007 • No. 7
