Back to Where It All Began
Well, who would have expected this? On June 29, 2004, RatBlurt published his first blog on Blogger.com. The post was an excerpt from a never-finished novel titled There He Goes, which depicts a world in which US presidents are “elected” in much the same way as Miss USA or Mr. America win their titles every year. Yes, you guessed it: a presidential pageant. And yes, I know the title is sexist. The book’s main character did, too. And I quote:
Before we go any farther, I want to say a word about the title. I don’t consider myself to be a chauvinist. I try to be sensitive to women’s issues and be fair and considerate in my official and unofficial dealings with them. But the title of this book is what it is. After all, I am President of the United States. I’m sitting at my desk in the Oval Office writing this while the machinery of the U.S. Federal Corporation hums smoothly around me. The title has nothing to do with the fact that I’m male and President. What it is, in fact, is the first words of the song sung by the Bert Parks hologram when I won the Third Annual United States Presidential Pageant in the year 2008.
Now, in 2023, RatBlurt has decided that maintaining the RatBlurt website is more trouble and expense than it is worth. Hence, he decided to move back to Blogger (which, inevitably perhaps, Google now owns and so RatBlurt has to log in with his Gmail credentials).
The novel’s main character is named Bixby (I had it before the Android AI, thank you very much). His “work” consists mainly of making public appearances at places like Jim-Bob’s Flaming Death Barbecue Joint. He also spends much of his time taking crap from Maxine Fliedermaus, his personal secretary, who is “one-third of the White House staff, the other two-thirds being the groundskeeper, Olaf, and the security guard, Bruce.”
Reading back through the novel’s opening pages made me wonder if we’ve had any especially weird and wacky presidential elections in our country’s history. (I use the qualifier “especially” because every election here is weird and wacky and getting more so it seems every year.)
This thought generated some excitement because it gave me the chance to use the AI ChatBot that Microsoft recently added to its internet browser. It doesn’t have a name yet so I’ll just call it “Clippy” in fond memory of the short-lived animated MS Word assistant. “Clippy,” I asked, “what has been the weirdest presidential election?” It answered, “There have been many strange and controversial presidential elections in US history” and gave four examples. One of them was the 1800 election in which Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr tied. With the example, it provided a link to a LiveScience article titled “The Nastiest, Strangest Elections in US History.” The piece explains how the tie occurred (the Electoral College, what else?). It also gives a juicier example: the 1828 election where Andrew Jackson (a Democrat) and John Quincy Adams (a National Republican) were the candidates. To say the mudslinging got hot and heavy is an understatement.
Jackson has lost the previous election in 1824 to Adams thanks to a tie-breaking vote by Speaker of the House Henry Clay. Adams then chose Clay as his secretary of state, which Jackson called “a corrupt bargain.” Things went down hill from there:
And that was before the 1828 election even got started, when Adams was accused of pimping out an American girl to a Russian Czar. Jackson’s wife, Rachel, was called a “convicted adulteress,” because she had, years earlier, married Jackson before finalizing her divorce to her previous husband. Rachel died after Jackson won the election, but before his inauguration; at her funeral, Jackson blamed his opponents’ bigamy accusations. “May God Almighty forgiver her murderers, as I know she forgave them,” Jackson said. “I never can.”
The Encyclopedia Britannica describes the 1828 election as “arguably one of the most significant in United States history, ushering in the era of political campaigns and paving the way for the solidification of political parties.” Thanks for that. It also was an election characterized by “personalities and slander.” A ThoughtCo article noted that “by the time the votes were cast, both men would have wild stories circulated about their pasts, with lurid charges of murder, adultery, and procuring of women being plastered across the pages of partisan newspapers.”
So kudos, as a closing thought, to that guy who said “the more things change, the more they stay the same.” The only way he could know that, I’m sure, is because he had his own version of the DMC DeLorean with flux capacitor. I almost wish, though, that he had given a bit more thought to that statement and its impact on the world to come. If he had, he might have gone with a more Magic 8 Ball answer like, “The more things change….better not to tell you now.” Or ever, for that matter.
(Image: Bert Parks, 1956. Public domain. Note that the look of RatBlurt on Blogger (rat-blurt.blogspot.com) will likely change from time to time as he mucks about trying to find something that will make him look as handsome, blogaphorically speaking, as Bert does in his head shot. Good luck with that.)
