Nobody knows you and nobody gives a damn

Despite our best efforts, we are beginning to slide into the deep winter funk. Shorter days = more time for drinking. Bunker mentality. Libidoless brain crash. A needle-like prodding towards making late nate calls to various dealers, to unleash the furies on the imagination and deaden the cyclones in our dreams. To seriously hunker down with a bottle of sour mash and the Iron and Wine back catalog and the, like, 18 books we own about Abraham Lincoln.

We've been thinking a lot about Honest Abe lately. A few weeks ago we had a little public reading at Casa Borracho (note to Miles...totally the new name of our place) and out came Abe's second inaugural from an old book of Lincoln speeches we happen to own. But the book had only about half the speech. We were very surprised at first, then realized the obviousness of it all. Of course the most incindeary section was gone.

You see, in his second inaugural address Lincoln comes right out and says that the Civil War, the most vast and horrific conflict in this nation's history, was its punishment at the hands of the divine, and that our nation was due for it. Read for yourself. This did not sit well with many Americans. I don't know if another politician has ever or would ever have the cajones to tell the American people that it was high time we atoned for anything. Jimmy Carter asked the people to turn down the heat and put on a damn sweater already, and he got bounced very shortly thereafter.

The shrub wouldn't make that speech. He's no dummy. He just kinda talks about a day of fire and the dark corners of the world and the tyrany and evil-doers. He needs to admit that our hands have stirred various pots of tyranny around the world for decades, ever since Teddy Roosevelt set the white fleet sail and decided to use the Monroe Doctrine to justify various colonial adventures. That we have sinned, that our nation's character is stained, that our foreign policies are bearing bitter fruit, that our generation is paying for the sins of its fathers as did the one before. And that the cycle might not end, or if it does that the world will burn.

But enough of this serious business. Like our friends over at Wound Up, we've got some fancy new scanning devices up in this biyotch. Who are you freaks? Leave us some comments. Send us an email. Check in. Do. Konechiwa, bitches!




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