Inappropriate Content: Lincoln

Friday was the 140th anniversary of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth, a crazed lone gunman; while Booth was part of a conspiracy to assassinate the President, and several members of the conspiracy were found with Booth and were tried and executed shortly after Lincoln's death, John Wilkes Booth was still a crazed lone gunman, because people who shoot the President are crazed lone gunman, therefore John Wilkes Booth was a crazed lone gunman.

I love America.

In any case, you can click here to listen to this man, Julius Howell, talk about where he was when he heard President Lincoln had been shot. In 1865, Howell was a 16-year-old Confederate army man and prisoner at the Yankee POW camp in Point Lookout, Maryland. Shortly after his 101st birthday, which was shortly after the end of World War II, Howell made several recordings for the Library of Congress.

Speaking of Abraham Lincoln, one of my classmates was recently spoiling the surprise at the end of the movie Sahara for me. He's a young Italian man of imposing stature (my classmate, not President Lincoln) and he sound a lot like someone you'd meet on The Sopranos. He comes from New Jersey, where he got certified as an auto mechanic; he'd like a decent job until he can get his first mortgage and go into real estate, where he plans to undertake some shady, but not quite illegal, deals. He's a Pentecostal (Petecostalist? did I just make up a word?) who was raised Roman Catholic; he still loves a lot of the ceremonial stuff in the church, but has problems with the doctrine. Not even the really horribly anti-human parts of the doctrine (which Dan Savage complains about here; also zombie fetishes) but the unimportant—even, dare I say it, silly—parts of the doctrine, like worshiping the Virgin. Still, this classmate, he's extremely sharp. If I ever need anyone “taken care of,” this is the guy I'm calling. I loaned him my copy of the Red Dwarf novels, he's going to reciprocate by lending me his copy of Sahara, the novel on which the Matthew McConaughey movie is based.

After he spoiled the surprise ending to the book (which involves a sunken Confederate battleship in the middle of the Sahara desert because why the hell not?), I rubbed the bridge of my nose, sighed, and said, “all of Lincoln's Secretaries of War were drunken incompetents or incompetent drunks. The only really smart member of his cabinet, Salmon Chase, was Chief Justice of the Supreme Court by the end of the war. So just who in hell was going to pull that off?”

I'm still trying to remember the name of Lincoln's Secretary of—I think it was State; in any case, there was one other very intelligent man on Lincoln's cabinet. I just can't remember the name off hand. [William Seward, stabbed in his home by a co-conspirator of Booth's the night Lincoln was shot. Yay, Google!] I'm never quite as smart as I sound like I am. [Unless I have Google!]

So: Sahara—If you loved the superstitious perversion of American History that was National Treasure, you'll love this! Now playing!