lookingland

last night i meant to get other stuff done, but after wasting nearly two hours watching the highly recommended The Descent, i fell into a stupor and spent the rest of the evening reading. which is just as well because it now means i'm on track for the

50bookchallenge. last year i vowed to read some contemporary fiction and i think i did an okay job of lacing my usual fare with some unusual choices. this year i dunno how far i will stray off the path since right now my reading pile is largely research-related.

today's addition was less research than just a fun romp through familiar territory, however.

no. 2 ~ Assassination Vacation by sarah vowell. i really enjoyed this a lot and recommend it as one perspective for anybody heading down that trail of interest (a springboard, perhaps). what vowell does that is good is to highlight the peculiarity of the american fascination with its more morbid aspects of history and the curiosity of relics. her descriptions of the carefully preserved tour houses, bone fragments, bloody sheets, etc. are hilarious (the doctor's description of finding the bullet in lincoln's brain and vowell's commentary on the whole event is worth the price of admission alone). where vowell fails, however, is in her discursiveness. maybe i just don't know the genre, but i wanted to hear less about her self-amusement and more about the subject matter, the surface of which she barely scratches here.

while i feel a kinship with anyone who would take their time to drive down to geneva to visit the decapitated head of lewis powell (though she didn't do it in a plymouth prowler, so i can yet one-up her for it), vowell and i converge at important aspects of the assassination fandom. for one, she's a staunch supporter of lincoln himself in that sort of revisionist way. she repeatedly browbeats booth's stupidity for martyring an unpopular president, and then deifies lincoln herself, going so far as to think it ironic that at the dedication of chester's memorial, the crowd was segregated (as if lincoln himself would have disapproved). she also gushes on about her attraction to the gentlemanly powell, calls john surratt a weasel (i'm with her there), and then spends the majority of her energy on the question of samuel mudd's innocence.

in other words, i think, for all the energy and cleverness she has put here, she is either not telling the whole truth of her infatuation with the conspirators or missing the point entirely. this is most clearly evident in the occasional comparison of the political climate of 1861-1865 to the political climate of today (something i find myself doing often enough).

vowell reflects on guantanamo bay at dry tortugas, for example, thinking of the human rights violations perpetrated against the four unhanged conspirators left to rot there, but offers no word of outcry for the miserable two months of torture endured by the hanged men (and woman) who were almost every bit as innocent of lincoln's murder. she also spends a lot of time accentuating what a racist booth was as if he was the only one who felt that way (and as if those feelings were a singularly Southern peculiarity), as if part of that bigotry wasn't fueled by the 600,000 bodies piled up around the country, as if the president in office then hadn't trampled over every Constitutional right guaranteed its citizens to free slaves which the majority of the country either was against or couldn't care less about. none of which excuses anything on any side, but which vowell reduces to a rather simple case of one lunatic filled with hateful perverted ideologies against the great emancipator. there's truth in that, but so much more. and i wish vowell had opened the door on the so much more part rather than leave us dangling on what amounts to a rehash of 140+ years of simple reductions.

i really liked this book and recommend it (it's thought-provoking at the very least). but i think unless you know something about which she's writing, the context will be largely lost and the nuances of the era smothered in the american schtick that popular culture has passed down to us today. the book feels, at last, hurried (three assassinations crammed together when each coud have been a book of its own). i wish she would have spent more time developing it. i could go on itemizing the ways, but i accept that it clearly wasn't her intention. the book is mostly just a toss-off: it's fun, it's a bit snide, and it's meant to entertain.

and for the record for those of you bewildered at my ongoing defense of presidential assassins: i like lincoln. and i like a lot of the things he said. for this reason his gettysburg address remains a very important part of my writing, always. but he was a politician. i think he did the best he could under impossible circumstances. he succeeded in preserving the Union, often relying on his despicable cabinet to dirty their hands with the worst of it so that he could focus on the more diplomatic aspects of his job. if he had survived the assassination, he likely would have pardoned his would-be killers because it was the kind of magnanimous gesture that would have been in the country's best interests (and he was a lawyer, he would have seen the injustice of sentencing them to death).

above all, he said things that he believed people wanted to hear (what president doesn't?). he was well-intentioned, but not altruistic. he was a realist. he had no qualms about sending every other mother's son into combat while bowing to the pleas of his own wife not to sacrifice their own boy. he was, ultimately, only human.

oh, and vowell also writes about garfield and mckinley, but oy vey, i've gone on long enough!

: D