This is another ongoing series as I do a slow-read of THE ILIAD by Homer, translated by Rouse. Previous installments: book 1 | 2 | 3 | 4

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“Diomedes, You Unit”

Now that Athena has successfully pissed off both sides—and more importantly, instigated the Trojans to break the terms of the peace treaty until Menelaus and Paris finish their duel—the fight is on in earnest, and the Greeks (Achaians) are able to take the brakes off. They send in the Big Gun.

Enter Diomedes, an absolute unit of a man who could pwn just about anyone on a normal day. Today is special, though: Athena, literal goddess of war, equips him with numerous buffs (basically Ye Olde Greek Zero Carb Monster Energy) and sends him into battle with his hair on fire.

Diomedes then starts racking up kills like it’s a ranked contest and the prize is Sydney Sweeney. What happens next is another famous roll-call scene where This Guy beats the tar out of That Guy who was related to That Other Guy and so on, repeated ad nauseum as we figure out which important people were killed by whom, and how. Diomedes is kicking so much sphincter that neither side knows who he belongs to, it’s just wholesale anus-whipping at low, low prices, and Diomedes Outlet is open for business, everything must go.

Remember Pandaros, that stupid archer who kicked all this off? He sees Diomedes going and—we’ve established he’s stupid, don’t let that go—he thinks I can totally take that guy down with my totally special bow and arrows. And to his credit, he puts one right through Diomedes’ shoulder, drawing blood and proving he’s mortal.

Diomedes, however, is a pious man, and does what any good Christian Greek man of faith would do, and says a nice little prayer to the god of charity glute-flogging, that he may have power to forgive smite his enemy, yay, with a very mighty smitey, and lo, Athena did smile favorably upon her servant berserker, and sent him a booster pack with +5 agility, +8 courage, and extra manna for stamina.

“Go forth, my child, and flay their colons open, be they man or god, in fact, you can kill pretty much any god you see—and I am showing them to you, make no mistake—but don’t kill Aphrodite, you really don’t have to, I mean…you’ll see her out here, but she sucks at this, it'd be totally unnecessary for you to kill her, so just don’t. Lol. Stick her with your spear, I guess.”

Diomedes, with fervent gratitude, returns to the battle at 3x his previous level of posterior destruction, and builds a literal wall of corpses through his enemies (everyone). Eventually he stumbles across a Significant Historical Figure.

Ever heard of a guy named Aeneas? He’s kind of important here, and he’ll play a role in the foundation of Rome later on. So, spoiler, you know he survives this battle, but he’s gonna lose some homies along the way. He sees Diomedes coming like a freight train out of Dante’s fourteenth circle of hell, and asks the archer Pandaros to maybe pretty please take another shot. And Pandaros is like “Bro, I don’t know if you’ve seen my track record today, but every time I do this…”

Aeneas hits him back with the classic “Trust me bro, just use your spear, I’ll chase him with my chariot, and we’ll tag-team this guy.” And he’s maxed on charisma stats, so Pandaros says “Bet.” They run at Diomedes. Pandaros chucks his spear. It hits Diomedes and for a second it looks like it killed him.

Then Diomedes smiles and says something in Greek, probably the name of a key component of female anatomy, and chucks a spear back at Pandaros. Gets him right in the mouth and…I mean it’s a spear, you know what happens next. Pandaros is insta-dead, and now Diomedes can focus in on Aeneas, prince of Troy.

He picks up a rock that’s so damned big it would take two normal people to get it off the ground, and he raises it over his head and—this is quite disrespectful of him—smashes Aeneas under it partway so that his hip socket is shattered, leaving him alive by in excruciating pain.

Who should come to intervene on Pretty Boy Aeneas’ behalf than Aphrodite herself, who throws her body across Aeneas and is like “Noooo he’s too handsome to die, nooooo…” and Diomedes almost crushes her too. He bashes up her wrist pretty bad but she doesn’t exactly bleed because, hey, goddess, and her crying draws Apollo’s attention, and he helps her get away with Aeneas. Diomedes then continues to kill people.

Book 5 closes with Diomedes squaring off against Ares, and by now he is so jacked up on that sweet sweet Athena Combat Sauce that he 1v1’s the actual god of war and stabs him in the stomach, sending him back to Olympus crying like a little twink. “Zeus, Daddy, pwease make the bad man stop!”

Question: where the HELL was Diomedes in the 2004 Troy movie?!

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“Electoral Brawlage” examines the first inaugural address of each president in U.S. history, with some commentary and analysis. Check back on Mondays for more.

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Coming off the heels of the hotly-contested 1876 election, wherein the loser took a clear plurality of the popular vote (lol) but lost the Electoral Vote by ONE (thanks to a Congressional decision along party lines), the 1880 election might have been a bloodbath for the incumbent party.

The Republicans had held the White House for 20 years straight, encompassing the entire Civil War, the first presidential assassination, the first presidential impeachment, big scandals in the Grant administration, and severe division against Hayes. The idea that the GOP would hold the White House for a sixth term was almost laughable.

And yet…

James A. Garfield (Ohio) ran on the GOP ticket with Chester A. Arthur (New York) as his VP. OH and NY were well-established picking-points for candidates by now. Garfield was the compromise candidate from a deadlocked convention; he had political experience as a congressman and military experience as a Union general.

Garfield is described by historians as a “polymath,” very intelligent and good at numerous things. He was fluent in Greek and Latin and was ambidextrous, though the legend of him being able to simultaneously write in Greek with one hand and Latin in the other might be made-up. Nevertheless he was a man who excelled in many areas. Like Lincoln, he was raised in a log cabin.

On the Democrat side, Winfield Scott Hancock (Pennsylvania) and William H. English (Indiana) mounted their challenge. Hancock was also a Civil War general though he didn’t have Garfield’s political experience.

Side note: Indiana continues to pop up as the origin point for Vice Presidents, especially during this stretch. I got curious so I looked it up: 10 different VP candidates have been from Indiana, and two of those were in my lifetime (Quayle and Pence). We’ve only had 50 vice presidents, and 8 of them were from the Crossroads State. New York is the only state to have produced more VP candidates (14) but not as many of them have gone on to win.

Ticket Tally

Garfield got 48.3 percent of the popular vote to Hancock’s 48.2. This is a useful metric because it shows that both men were well-liked by the country. The Electoral gap was wider (214-155) but they each won exactly 19 states, with Hancock taking the South and Garfield taking the North/West.

Inaugural Points

Garfield’s inaugural address was average in length—not as curt as Grant, and certainly not as verbose as Harrison. He opens by marking the centennial of America’s first post-independence government, the Articles of Confederation, and then makes note of forthcoming anniversaries in the 1880s. He talks about the brilliance of the Founders, how the country has added twenty-five states and survived a Civil War, and has elevated the status of its “Negro” (black) population from slaves to citizens. He acknowledges the upheaval in Southern communities from this and that there are still things to figure out.

He continues the GOP platform point of universal education, because an uneducated electorate will doom the future prospects of the country and its supremacy. (Read book, learn thing!) On fiscal policy he supported the gold standard and was open to the future practice of “bimetallism” (we’ll see more about this in future elections) as long as it was tied to international approval. (Complicated to explain why.)

Garfield also emphasized the need for improved unity between the North and the South. Doubtless he looked at the electoral ticket returns and saw something extremely glaring in the breakdown.

Like any good President he closed with humility and a plea to God to continue America’s prosperity.

Garfield would sadly be assassinated four months into his term by a madman, but we’ll get into that next week.

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“This Week in 1776” is an ongoing almanac of events from the American Revolution, mostly political and military in nature. I drew on these very loosely for my Engines of Liberty series of YA novels.

You should also check out The History List—they have an excellent merch store and occasionally they get valuable historical pieces that are very much worth their prices. I’m not sponsored by them, they just make great stuff.

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May 10th-16th, 1776, saw a broadening of the Independence movement from state to state. Remember that at the time, the colonies were kind of like their own little countries that adhered to British law and lived under British rule, and their main binding force on this side of the Atlantic was the Continental Congress. The “federal government” didn’t exist yet, just the individual colonial governments, which were usually filled by royal appointment (and thus became vectors for royal butt-kissing instead of public service.)

The Sons of Liberty couldn’t use Congress to speak for “the nation at large” because there wasn’t one yet. They needed the individual colonial governments to have their own microcosmic revolutions and independence movements before the national movement could come underway.

John Adams

Congress couldn’t physically replace King George, they could only deign to sever ties with him, but they could encourage the colonies to depose their local governors and start their own governments instead, “sufficient to the exigencies of their affairs”. (Adams.) They passed their initial resolution for this on May 10th, then came back five days later on the 15th with a new preamble that had even stronger language behind it:

…it appears absolutely irreconcilable to reason and good Conscience, for the people of these colonies now to take the oaths and affirmations necessary for the support of any government under the crown of Great Britain,

and it is necessary that the exercise of every kind of authority under the said crown should be totally suppressed, and all the powers of government exerted, under the authority of the people of the colonies…

—Journals of the Continental Congress, v4

The wiggle-room was gone and the time for the colonies to get on board had arrived.

New York and Canada

Fortifications continued in the former, and the retreat finished up from the latter. There are skirmishes elsewhere in the colonies but these two sites are the major conflicts. The forces under the command of Benedict Arnold and John Thomas are scattered, poorly supplied, and dealing with sickness. Word of this reaches Washington but there’s little he can do to help.

Remember the Ladies

For as much as Lin-Manuel Miranda wrote a bunch of cringey feminist wish-list crap into his Hamilton songs, there actually were documented calls to consider womens’ interest in the Independence movement. To the surprise of no one, Abigail Adams was a big driver of this. She wrote a letter to John (which then circulated among his peers) with no uncertain language:

John took a look at the letter, probably laughed, and said “Women!”

But his reply to Abby was a little more detailed:

Also, they really didn’t believe in running Ye Olde Spell Check at House Adams, did they? My word.

Colonial Killdozer Gains Steam

We’re seven weeks away from the Declaration of Independence. The colonies have won some smaller fights against the Redcoats, and with the victory at Boston, spirits are high. Canada doesn’t have the same interests as the other colonies (although the Continental Congress still wouldn’t mind having them) so the military frustrations there aren’t great, but aren’t fatal. With the spreading of the Independence Movement in colonial governments, it’s only a matter of time before this becomes a national show.

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2026 is America’s 250th birthyear. To celebrate, I’m highlighting 50+ significant American documents from our history. So far I have covered The Mayflower Compact, Patrick Henry’s Speech, The Lee Resolution, The Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, the Treaty of Paris, the Virginia Plan, The Northwest Ordinance, The Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Louisiana Purchase, the Star-Spangled Banner, the Monroe Doctrine, the Indian Removal Act, the Knickerbocker Baseball Club rules, Lincoln’s ‘House Divided’ Speech, the Emancipation Proclamation, Jefferson Davis’ inaugural address, and the Appomattox Surrender Letters.

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The Homestead Act

As early as the 1840s, Congressmen in the United States (including Andrew Johnson, who eventually succeeded Lincoln as president) pitched ideas that would become components of the 1862 Homestead Act. The plan was to settle the interior of the country and enrich American families with land that was otherwise not being used, provided you weren’t an Amerindian tribe.

This was post-Trail of Tears. Indian Territory had already been established. The Homestead Act targeted what was mainly the Great Plains; Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, and Dakota (which was later divided in two.) Other homestead claims were filed farther west into the Rockies and the Great Basin, but the bulk of it was the Plains. Homesteading had been opposed by the South primarily on the grounds of the slavery question (new States and territories weren’t supposed to allow the practice, but residents disputed this). With the South seceding and the Civil War underway, opposition to the Act basically evaporated, and the 1860 GOP had campaigned on homesteading, so passing it was a no-brainer.

What did it entail?

In short, any head of household who was twenty-one or older, a U.S. citizen (or in the process of becoming one), and who had never taken up arms against the nation (southerners need not apply) could secure a parcel of land up to 160 acres in total size for the nominal filing fee of $18. That’s about $600 in 2026.

The lion’s share of applicants were farmers, though some were also recently freed slaves, and the language of the Act allowed for women to purchase it themselves if they wanted. This triggered a land rush and a westward expansion that would continue into the next century even despite the War.

There were other stipulations: you couldn’t buy up land that you weren’t going to occupy yourself. No robber barons could snatch up huge tracts for 19-century hedge fund equivalents. It wasn’t a move made purely for capital, but for the material well-being of the country and its people. America was strong when its citizens had families, homes, and a means to provide their own food.

Sections 1 and 2 state what the Act does, who can apply for it, and so on. Section 3 is about local governments keeping records of who owns what and where. Section 4 states that lands acquired under the Act can’t be taken from their owners to collect debts, which effectively bank-proofed the homestead plots. It probably made it hard to borrow, but it also made it hard for banks to steal from the homesteaders. (Retvrn.)

Section 5 stipulated the terms under which Homestead lands could revert to the government (such as abandonment), and section 6 set the 160-acre limit (among other things.) 7 and 8 are just other legal details about ownership and payment

The Impact

Obviously the net result was the development of a huge section of the interior of the country and the enrichment of several working-class families, though these people also had regular clashes with the Indians in much the same way that Texans had with the Comanches a few decades before. It was no small source of conflict between different groups of people, but I dare say that you’d pay $600 bucks for even a half-acre of land today, let alone 160, and you’d accept the risks that came along with that.

In fact, it wasn’t just that it was $600; when that $18 fee was imposed, the average annual income for a working farmhand was around $300. So if your average entry-level wagie today is making around $40,000, the Homestead fee would be the equivalent of $2,400. Which is not an insubstantial amount, but you’d borrow that in a heartbeat if, once again, it meant even a couple of acres. You’d live in a tent and figure out the rest in real time if it meant land for you and your future family, even if it meant dealing with the occasional racist knife-wielding neighbor who didn’t want you in his neck of the woods.

You can see why so many people took up the chance and headed out west. It’s hard to know the exact percentage of Americans who participated, for a number of reasons: first, the Act was in effect from 1863 to 1976, including stretches of time when multiple States joined the Union (including Alaska, but that was a different animal.) Second, not everybody who staked a claim was “American,” as many of them were immigrants who showed up and immediately hustled out to the Plains. Third, around 4 million Homestead claims are on record, but more than half of those (2.4 million) failed/were deserted/reverted to the government over the course of time.

But if the goal was to settle the western U.S. in earnest, well, a century of the Act certainly enabled that to happen.

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This is another ongoing series as I do a slow-read of THE ILIAD by Homer, translated by Rouse. Previous installments include book 1, 2, and 3.

Zeus and Hera are pretty messed up.

The war isn’t going well, and the parents of the gods know that they can’t keep working directly against each other and expect to succeed. They both have their favorites and unfortunately for Hera, Zeus’s favorite city is Ilios (Troy). They open book 4 with an argument over who gets to prevail here, and it’s as ugly a marital spat as anything you might see in the trailer park—provided you haven’t seen lightning and thunder in the trailer park, created ex nihilo.

Zeus openly declares his intention to support King Priam and Troy. Hera, who is of the same birth and standing as Zeus, offers him any of her favorite cities in return and promises not to defend them if he wants to destroy them, he just has to give up on Troy. (She seriously offers him Argos, Sparta, and Mycenai.)

Hera succeeds in nagging her husband into compliance and Zeus eventually agrees to let her manipulate the Trojans into breaking the pact they just made with the Achaians; as long as Paris is kept away from Menelaus, Menelaus can’t kill him, and until one of the two is dead, the armies can’t honorably engage one another. (Honor’s a big deal so they abide by it.)

Ergo, someone needs to screw up.

Enter Athena, Again.

The Greeks and Trojans both witness Athena coming down from Olympus and they get a little stoked. Things are happening! She favors our side…no, she favors our side! I guess we’ll see!

No, you won’t see, because Athena pulls a divine chameleon act and disguises herself as a soldier so she can move among the Trojan army. She finds an archer by the name of Pandaros and starts putting the charm on him, hyping him up to do something really stupid. Before long he’s pulling out his prized bow, lining up an arrow, and taking a shot at Menelaus from not too great a distance (“He let himself be persuaded, poor fool!”)

As soon as the arrow flies, that same Athena crosses the battlefield and deflects the arrow from its lethal destination, instead embedding it in Menelaus’ belt buckle so that it nicks his flesh but doesn’t wound him. The Greeks see their champion bleed, see the Trojan arrow sticking out of his clothes, and know the pact has been violated.

The “it” switch has officially been flipped into the “on” position. Agamemnon sends for a surgeon to stitch up Menelaus, and then both sides draw their weapons for an earnest, blood-in-the-sand fight. Agamemnon talks some trash, Odysseus stands up for himself, and there’s some “poetic negotiating” to get the men motivated to scrap, but scrap they do, and soon both Greek and Trojan are stacking bodies. You might not know this, but Odysseus is pretty good at fighting, and I suspect that’ll come in handy with things he has to tackle later in life.

But yeah, for now, things have just gotten increasingly real. Most people just have another kid when they’re having marital problems; Zeus and Hera like to stir the pot harder than that.

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“Electoral Brawlage” examines the first inaugural address of each president in U.S. history, with some commentary and analysis. Check back on Mondays for more.

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Some background…

I turned 16 in the year 2000. Until then I basically only remembered a few presidential elections, and both had been won by Bill Clinton. I remember the brief Bush 41 presidency but I was only 4 when he took office. My parents, staunch conservatives, were disappointed (to say the least) that Bush didn’t get a second term, and again when Bob Dole lost in ‘96. So when the 2000 election came around, with all the shenanigans related thereto, it was a big deal.

Conservatives wanted the Reagan Era to come back, and liberals wanted continuity with the boom of the 90’s under Clinton. Let’s be real though, it wasn’t completely about policy arguments: Americans approach political parties the way they approach sports fandom. At the end of the day, lots of people wanted Their Team to beat the Other Team.

For those who were too young to remember it, the result of the 2000 election was rather insane, and turned the news cycle into an [expletive deleted] circus for about a month and a half. The Supreme Court had to get involved and in the end, George W. Bush was declared the winner of West Palm Beach County, Florida—ultimately meaning he was the next president.

Ever since then, the 2000 election has been invoked as the prime example of either corruption or close calls in presidential politics. “The worst in our history.” (At least until 2020, but we’ll get there in a few months.) The losers still cry about it to this day as a stolen election.

I probably said something to this effect about the 1824 and 1828 elections between J.Q. Adams and Andrew Jackson, but it is once again true in the case of the 1876 election: if you think 2000 was the first time this has happened, you are unaware of your nation’s history. Rutherford B. Hayes would like a word with you.

The Centennial Election

The Grant Administration was, unfortunately, a saga of missteps and corruption (though it had its great moments too.) Grant himself was a great man who had a bad habit of trusting the wrong people in his cabinet. Story for another time. The takeaway is that if the Republicans were going to hold on to the White House beyond ‘76, they’d need a clean break from Grant, and couldn’t run with his first VP Schuyler Colfax, who only served one term due to a scandal. Grant’s second VP, Henry Wilson, had died in office. Things looked grim.

Enter Hayes, an Ohio man through-and-through, who had served in Congress and also as the state’s governor for multiple terms. He picked a New Yorker, William Wheeler, as his running mate. The ticket was popular and well-balanced, provided you were a Northerner, but Hayes was sympathetic to the South. Overall, the ticket had good prospects.

Opposite Hayes was Samuel Tilden, a New York lawyer and an acolyte of Martin Van Buren. He picked Thomas Hendricks from Indiana, a popular former governor who gave the ticket some Midwestern balance. The election was sorely contested and, with a decade of Reconstruction behind them, the South was ready to participate at a level that they hadn’t enjoyed since the end of the War.

Turnout was near to 82% of the country’s eligible voter population. Tilden won the popular vote outright—and you’ve never heard me say this before, but that doesn’t count for either diddly nor for squat, thanks to God and our Founders—with a whopping 51%. Now let’s take a look at the Electoral Vote total.

Here’s where it gets tricky.

Tilden racked up a convincing 184 votes. Hayes only got 165. At the time, 369 votes were up for grabs, so 185 was the magic number. You’re doing the math and asking “But Graham, where are the other 20 votes?”

They were hiding. They were sneaky little votes. They camped out in the dark corners of Florida, Louisiana, South Carolina, and, inexplicably, one little turd from Oregon. In some cases, dual returns were reported. Allegations of fraud hit the newswires, with rumors of ballot box intimidation and more. Nobody could certify the election and the count dragged on for months, through the New Year and into March.

Congress then put together a panel of 8 Republicans and 7 Democrats to figure out what the hell had happened and who the next president should have been. To the shock of absolutely no one, this panel’s decision came down to a vote, and that vote was decided along party lines. Those 8 Republicans voted to hand the 20 missing EVs to Hayes, bringing the final tally to 185-184, GOP.

They decided this two days before inauguration.

Result

Yeah, 2000 was a circus and 2020 was pretty nuts, but woo damn, this had people fired up. Congress knew the only way they were going to get the South to go along with this was to compromise, and compromise they did. The Compromise of 1877 stated that those Southern electors would vote in Hayes’ favor, and to calm everyone’s tempers, the Fed would (at long last) withdraw all its troops from the South, which had occupied the former Confederacy since the end of the War. Rutherford B. Hayes’ election ended the Reconstruction Period, though it wouldn’t end conflict between the North and the South. Not by a mile.

His Address

With all that history, I almost don’t give a damn what he said in his inaugural address. The Democrats sure didn’t, and they referred to Hayes as His Fraudulency throughout the rest of his time in office. (You would too, no matter your party today.) Still, he had a set of objectives and he laid them out once he took office:

• Permanent pacification of the country. Securing full constitutional rights for the South, peaceful local government (including for blacks), and urging an end of racial segregation.

• Universal suffrage based on education. The exact phrase is “universal suffrage resting on universal education” which called for the creation of a public school system at each state’s level, supported by national aid if needed. (This sounds good on paper, but 150 years later I question the results.)

• Civil service reform. He wanted appointment in the government to be based on merit and not connections. Sorry Rusty, you’re gonna be waiting on this one for a while.

• Return to specie payments. The country had been in a depression since the start of Grant’s second term in 1873 and paper currency had a lot to do with why. Hayes wanted a gold standard for currency. This is a good policy.

• Acceptance of election results. Lol. Yeah I get why you’re saying this, bud—and hopefully you get why your opponents disagree. If Congress had put 8 Democrats on that committee instead of 7 you’d probably be singing a very different song.

There was more, but those five stood out. Go read the address. This was the result of the nation’s Centennial Election. The Bicentennial Election would be rather chaotic as well, and now that we’re in the 250th (which is a midterm year), you might be saying to yourself that things are uniquely crazy in our history.

They’re not. They’re just crazy. We’re America, baby! That’s where we excel.

My Amazon page has all my novels, including the critically-acclaimed FOSSIL FORCE for young boys, and the Engines of Liberty series for all ages.

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“Federalist Friday” is a six-part series wherein I share what I’m learning as I read the Federalist Papers in their entirety. Per the recommendation of my resident Ph.D., I’m using the Kesler edition, but I can’t seem to find a link to it on the ‘Zon. So I guess just follow along with whichever edition you prefer.

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You know…I’m glad I’m making myself read the Papers. It gives me the ammunition I need so I can dunk on my two worst enemies: myself, and the people who disagree with me.

Graham v Graham

Why this framing? Because I could have known all of this stuff a long time ago if I had just sat down and read this book, but I didn’t, and none of my excuses for that are all that compelling. Most of them boil down to laziness. Now that I’ve got my initial grasp on the arguments of Publius, I can smugly look down upon my intellectual opponents (numerous) and say “Ha! You fool. This was covered by Hamilton/Madison/Jay in Federalist [Number]!” And there can be no greater fool than I, for I was once among them.

Graham v The World

As I creep closer to the end of this project, my contempt for the Reddit class of Internet Arguers only rises, especially because the debate style of Publius is the standard by which all policy questions ought to be measured. Think of any proposed law as the stroke of a razor-sharp scalpel, and the impacted subjects of said law are a perfectly healthy human body with a tumor in one specific place.

The law has to be executed in order to remove the tumor. But you can’t cut beyond the tumor or you’ll destroy healthy tissue, maybe even cause a fatal bleed-out. Every legal question is the process by which you determine exactly where to cut to preserve life, not harm it. The Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and our entire federal Electoral process is the result of intense debate and discussion by minds that were more thorough, more patient, and more wise than the staggering majority of their modern naysayers. They made what they made for a reason, and yes, they did consider Your Argument. (I hope they laughed at it.)

Said naysayers target the large number of voters who 1) actually show up to the polls regularly and 2) don’t actually understand the system in which they live. Most of modern politics is just dishonest people trying to whip voters into a frenzy so they’ll support whatever self-serving (and destructive) policy is on their agendas. “The Electoral College is unfair, it should be the popular vote!” or “Why does Wyoming get the same number of Senators as California?” or “It’s not fair that Texas has one Congressman per 800,000 residents while Vermont gets one per 600,000!”

The inherent implication is that the system is unfair and should be scrapped.

Nobody who votes like that has actually read and understood the laws that explain how and why we use the system that we have. They should not have the right to vote. I’m rapidly accelerating toward a belief that one ought to pass a test demonstrating that they have read and comprehended the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Federalist Papers (since they won out) before being allowed to vote.

I’m just observant enough to believe some cabal of criminals would then subvert and isolate the test to their own ends, much as they have the narrative around the system in which we live. So the best defense is to continue learning the origins of the system, and work accordingly.

Madison Has Your Answers

Federalist 55 has some of the best text of the entire series because, unsurprisingly, it wasn’t written by Hamilton (Aaron Burr did nothing wrong). Madison uses 55 and 56 to lay out the exact mechanism by which the number of Congressmen is determined for each state, with an eye to the future of how populations will grow (and the number of Reps will grow accordingly.) It’s more complex than just fitting a fixed percentage and saying each state should have X amount per Y residents.

“It’s a scalpel, that’s a tumor, who cares if it’s in the lung or the brain stem? We should cut them the same.” Are you starting to understand the problem? Go read Federalist 55, I’m not going to summarize it all here, it’s a thorough argument, and he knew that it needed to be made:

For a moment as Federalist 55 came to a close, I started to worry that Madison was veering off into realms of naivete with regard to how easily Congress could be subverted by foreign influence (and foreign gold). Surely someone as wise as Madison could have foreseen someone as corrupt as Eric Swalwell, right? Yet he hits us with:

To which I say “Oh, buddy…” and I look at the current state of things. That said…my cynicism rightly has its limits, and the future fourth President had a decidedly more charitable view of humanity as well.

You cannot make a perfect system with an imperfect people. You can, however, put checks and balances in place to make it really hard for malicious people to subject the earnest citizen to their ill will. The key is that those earnest citizens need to be involved citizens, and enforce their righteous will when they have the just power to do so. Read and vote, kids.

Lightning Round

56-58 were also Madison. He further addresses concerns about the shortcomings of the House of Representatives as a legal body, and what safeguards exist to keep it from devolving into corruption. Note that the primary force against their corruption is frequent voting intervals. Once again, citizens need to pay attention to their local elections and vote accordingly. He also addresses the initial size of the House and how it will grow as the country grows. (Though later Congress would be capped, which flies in the face of this concept. If we can’t have more Reps, we should have fewer residents, and we can start by deporting the ones who don’t have the legal right to be here…)

59-63 were Hamilton. He contrasts the Constitutional method of setting the time and place for elections with the previous form under the Articles, which was subject to manipulation and corruption. Much of these Papers are also concerned with the election of Senators, which was not a direct process back then as it is now, and could be the subject of another article.

62 and 63 were Madison again. Madison contrasts the Senate with the House; a bicameral legislature is necessary so that each State has two forms of representation in Congress: first by population, and second by statehood. This is designed to keep small pockets of the country from mogging each other, as the kids say. He specifically cites the need for a Senate based on historical precedent, because older and wiser men provide a steadying hand for the nation. The Latin word “senatus” directly translates to mean “a body of older men.” A brain-trust, if you will. Boy have we deviated from that one.

Conclusion

If you want to know how we got the Congress that we have, and what it was designed to do (or not do), this leg of the Papers is where you will find the thoroughly-detailed arguments for that. Read it and tell me what you think.

Drive safe, see you out there. BUY MY NOVELS.

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“This Week in 1776” is an ongoing almanac of events from the American Revolution, mostly political and military in nature. I drew on these very loosely for my Engines of Liberty series of YA novels.

You should also check out The History List—they have an excellent merch store and occasionally they get valuable historical pieces that are very much worth their prices. I’m not sponsored by them, they just make great stuff.

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We are once again in between big events. Washington (the man, not the city) continues to fortify New York (the city, not the state) so it can repel a forthcoming British incursion. Congress is currently hanging out in Philadelphia, handling paperwork relevant to things already in motion (alliances with France, and so forth).

The real action is up north in CND, which is a weird name for a country, but they spell it “C, eh, N, eh, D, eh,” giving it enough vowels to say aloud. Americans are trying to get a foothold up there but they’re having a tough time of it; the Snow Brits are gritty, and the Yanks have to deal with supply problems and disease. Generals Richard Montgomery (you haven’t heard of him) and Benedict Arnold (but him, yes) are reluctantly pulling back over a long stretch of time.

The straw that broke the camel came on May 6 when a limited cluster of British warships pulled into Quebec to resupply the locals against the Americans. As a result the militia had to retreat, leaving valuable goods and weapons behind. Soon Britain would have undisputed control of Ontario.

The retreat would continue and, unfortunately, grow larger in the coming weeks, and American ambitions for a “fourteenth colony” up north would crumble until 2025 or so, when another executive started making noise about adding them into the fold.

This won’t be the last that we hear from Benedict Arnold.

If you like American history, read the Engines of Liberty series for all ages.

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This week D.J. Butler hosted a panel on his new show High Low Brow to discuss why Tolkien remains not only relevant, but superlative in fantasy literature.

I got to throw in my two cents along with iSamwise, iWizard, and a philologist named Liam who REALLY knows his stuff. We brought a varied background to the table and had a great discussion for almost two hours.

Stuff like this is why I’m behind on my Five-Minute Iliad, among other things, but it was completely worth it. Pick through it over the next week. It was a great time. Maybe 60 people watched it concurrently at the highest point and it's gone on to catch over a thousand views since.

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2026 is America’s 250th birthyear. To celebrate, I’m highlighting 50+ significant American documents from our history. So far I have covered The Mayflower Compact, Patrick Henry’s Speech, The Lee Resolution, The Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, the Treaty of Paris, the Virginia Plan, The Northwest Ordinance, The Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Louisiana Purchase, the Star-Spangled Banner, the Monroe Doctrine, the Indian Removal Act, the Knickerbocker Baseball Club rules. and Lincoln’s ‘House Divided’ Speech, the Emancipation Proclamation, and Jefferson Davis’ inaugural address.

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The End of the Civil War

Most people know where the war officially ended (Appomattox Courthouse, Virginia). Few have read the documents that made it so. The “treaty,” such as it was, came from a pair of letters between the Union commander (Grant) and the Confederate (Lee.)

The letters are, themselves, rather short and direct, especially Lee’s reply. Both men did eventually meet and Grant made overtures of respect toward the man as he accepted Southern surrender, but accounts from that meeting agree that Lee had little to say and was eager enough to see it done.

You can read the terms of the South’s surrender in the National Archives. All told, the Union dealt with the Confederacy very generously, even charitably, and Grant’s diplomacy toward Lee (and the South) would continue when he was President. If Lee wanted it overwith, Grant wanted it done in a spirt of unity. The war was over. They weren’t blues and grays any longer, they were Americans.

Grant’s attitude about that was reflected in the seizure of public property from the CSA (cannons, artillery, etc), which makes sense, as those things belonged to the legally sanctioned American military, but he didn’t go beyond his warrant by stealing anything that privately belonged to members of the Confederate army. They got to individually retain their small arms and, if they had them, horses and carriages.

This site here, from the NPS, has facsimiles and transcriptions of the original letters between Grant and Lee, in their own hand.

Whenever I think of the end of the Civil War, and the officers who brought it to its conclusion, I think of this moment and the attitudes that Grant and Lee had for each other: civility, charity, and respect. 160+ years later there are still people who want to litigate the Civil War and want the South punished in perpetuity for ill-perceived wrongdoings.

Yet the men who actually fought that war—and the commander who led it—decided that it was done, that the officers need not be rounded up and executed, and that the enlisted men ought to return to their lives as part of a re-unifying nation.

If you’ve got a problem with that, take it up with Grant, because he didn’t. What an underrated leader he was.

My Amazon page has all my novels, including the critically-acclaimed FOSSIL FORCE for young boys, and the Engines of Liberty series for all ages.

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“Electoral Brawlage” examines the first inaugural address of each president in U.S. history, with some commentary and analysis. Check back on Mondays for more.

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By the rules of masculine ad hominem, Ulysses S. Grant should never have become one of our greatest presidents: he was a ginger manlet (5’8”) whose job at one point was to sell firewood on the street corners of Saint Louis, he was so broke. He would eventually be given total control of the Union Army, and four years later he would be President. By the end of the war, men with whom he had attended West Point and had participated in his wedding would surrender to him.

Bro leveled up.

The election of 1868 came not quite at the end of a turbulent era, but in the middle of one, caused by the previous turbulent era. The Civil War was over and Reconstruction was underway in the South. The last man to win a presidential election had been shot a month after the start of his second term, and his successor was impeached, then came within one Senate vote of being removed from office. Unsurprisingly, Andrew Johnson did not win the Democratic nomination for president in 1868.

That honor went to Horatio Seymour, governor of New York (former). His VP was Francis Preston Blair, Jr, from Missouri. (Grant’s was Schuyler Colfax from Indiana.) Blair was popular in Missouri and therefore the South, while Colfax was the Speaker of the House.

The race was closer by popular vote than by Electoral, but I remind you once again that popular vote is not relevant for our purposes here, and only low-T crybaby losers (who can’t drive stick) use it as a metric for any sort of validity. Grant took 53% of the popular vote and 26 of 34 states, for an EV total of 214 to 80. It turns out that 1) winning the CW and 2) running on a platform of “Let us have peace” is a winning message to a war-weary nation.

So What Did He Say?

Every executive so far has started his time in office with something to the effect of “Boy this is terrifying and humbling, God help me…” but U.S. Grant had lived through the worst war on American soil, and had his fear burned out of him. He opens his inauguration thusly:

From there he lays out his policies and his approaches to the immediate problems the country faces: Reconstruction, application of law, and the war debt. Laws will now apply equally to everyone (can you even imagine) and if you don’t like a law, vote to change it. (This was back when the voter base wasn’t flooded with illegals from hellholes on the public dole and so your vote had a lot more impact.)

Sound fiscal policy was also on the docket. There would be taxes and such, aggressively temporary ones, and once the war debt was dismissed those taxes would go away (and they did.) He also made mention of recent ore discoveries in the Mountain West that could be exploited to enrich the nation in the wake of the conflict. (San Francisco’s Gold Rush was 20 years in the past by this time, but the Comstock Lode was only 10 years old and still being developed.) He looked forward to future strikes and finds that would continue to fuel America’s rise.

His most consequential foresight may have been this:

If every executive could have such a focus on the nation’s future leaders, damn, we’d be a lot better off.

The rest of the speech is short and to the point, as a military commander might issue it. Foreign policy? We want everyone to get along and we’ll be nice to you, but if you cross us, we are kicking you directly in the balls. Indians? I wanted them treated well, civilized, Christianized, and given citizenship. Suffrage? We need to settle this now and y’all should take a good look at the propose Fifteenth Amendment.

You need to read Ron Chernow’s 1,100-page biography of our eighteenth president, simply titled Grant. No bull, this man was one of the greatest presidents we’ve ever had and was instrumental in the peaceful execution of the Reconstruction. I read it back in 2020 and it was excellent. Easily made my best-of-year list and I will read it again.

I still need to get a copy of his personal memoirs, which he wrote and finished just a few days before dying. The sale of those memoirs settled his estate’s debts and set up his widow for the rest of her life.

Buy "Grant"

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My Amazon page has all my novels, including the critically-acclaimed FOSSIL FORCE for young boys, and the Engines of Liberty series for all ages.

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As promised, I used the money to buy books. More on that as they arrive…

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“This Week in 1776” is an ongoing almanac of events from the American Revolution, mostly political and military in nature. I drew on these very loosely for my Engines of Liberty series of YA novels.

You should also check out The History List—they have an excellent merch store and occasionally they get valuable historical pieces that are very much worth their prices. I’m not sponsored by them, they just make great stuff.

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(Sorry for missing last week, but I didn’t want to miss the 40th anniversary of Chernobyl.) This entry will cover April 19th-May 2.

Anniversaries and Such

I neglected to mention that on April 13th, Thomas Jefferson turned 33. When I was 33 I had finished Engines of Liberty, which, while exceedingly American, has not had as much of an impact on as many people. I digress.

Roger Sherman of Connecticut, who would go on to sign the Declaration of Independence in three short months, turned 55 on April 19th—which also marked the one-year anniversary of Lexington and Concord, aka the Shot Heard ‘Round the World.

Beefing Up the Big Apple

Between the 19th and the 30th, Washington continues to fortify New York the same way he did to Boston, prior to the militia’s success there. These things took time. The first line was at Brooklyn, consisting of numerous redoubts and forts (Putnam, Greene, Box, Stirling, and Defiance.)

Manhattan saw the construction of street barricades as well as Forts George and Washington (heh), with the former near Bowling Green and the latter near Washington Heights today. Fort Washington gave them a good view of the Hudson, and over on the New Jersey Palisades there was Fort Lee (or Fort Constitution). Fort Independence covered the Bronx and Harlem.

These covered the land, and to impede the waterways they sunk old ships or dragged chains across the way so that ships couldn’t sail through. Firepower and drills were meant to be a later resort; Washington would rather keep the British from making a landfall at all, especially without a comparable American naval power.

But on that front…

Nous sommes ici!

The French start helping out the Americans because the Americans are pissing off the British, and the French really hate the British (this has been going on for some time.) At the outset they provided covert material aide—munitions, powder, that sort of thing—through intermediaries. While France was not moving against Britain in the open, they had begun a fruitful military and diplomatic relationship with the Americans that would soon bloom into something far more potent.

But more on that when we get there.

If you like American history, read the Engines of Liberty series for all ages.

My Amazon page has all my novels, including the critically-acclaimed FOSSIL FORCE for young boys, and the

I post video reviews on YouTube.

Subscribe here for more book reviews and for articles on what I continue to learn as I read.

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2026 is America’s 250th birthyear. To celebrate, I’m highlighting 50+ significant American documents from our history. So far I have covered The Mayflower Compact, Patrick Henry’s Speech, The Lee Resolution, The Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, the Treaty of Paris, the Virginia Plan, The Northwest Ordinance, The Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Louisiana Purchase, the Star-Spangled Banner, the Monroe Doctrine, the Indian Removal Act, the Knickerbocker Baseball Club rules, Lincoln’s ‘House Divided’ Speech, and the Emancipation Proclamation.

Subscribe to get these articles in your inbox, along with my regular book/comic/movie reviews. I also like money, and if you like me having money, become a paid subscriber. There’ll be special content for you, including original fiction, and early access to posts.

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Not Quite President

There are two men who have technically held the office of American President, but that technicality is lifting WAY more weight than it’s qualified to, with bad form, bad knees, and a death wish.

The first is David Atchison, a Missouri Senator whose main claim to fame is that he was “President For A Day.” James K. Polk’s presidency ended on March 4, 1849, which was a Sunday, and Zachary Taylor refused to be inaugurated until March 5, in observance of the Sabbath. Due to presidential succession rules established in 1792, the president pro tempore of the Senate—a senator appointed as President of the Senate by the VP when the VP couldn’t be there—was next in line for the Executive Branch.

With Polk and his VP out, and no new president for a day, Atchison was, technically, president at that time. However he never took the Oath of Office, never put forth any policy, never did anything relevant to the office on that day. It was just another Sunday for the man. Law students and historians bring it up because it’s a unique occurrence in our history, that’s all.

The other not-quite-American-President was a colleague of David Atchison, an uppity guy with an above-average military and political career (but only just) from Mississippi: Senator Jefferson Davis. Both men were extremely pro-slavery and were making political moves to ensure that new territories like Kansas would receive the practice.

(This sucks because there are actually reasons to like David Atchison, like his advocacy on behalf of the Mormon settlers who were violently assaulted and repelled from his state in the 1840s; the Mormons were, themselves, anti-slavery, and voted as such, which is part of what the locals didn’t like about them, but I digress. I shall have to read more about Atchison.)

From the moment Abraham Lincoln won in 1860, the South started to secede, and a hasty government was assembled. Jefferson Davis didn’t campaign for the Confederate Presidency, but it was decided by the Southern power brokers that he should be Their Guy, and the mantle was thrust upon him. He held the office for the duration of the Civil War, first in Alabama, then later in Virginia. And he gave at least one—technically two—inauguration addresses.

The first address, like any American inaugural, describes his feelings upon assuming office. Humility, virtue, patriotism, ra ra ra.

The more I study the Revolution and the Civil War, the more I understand that the South viewed the Civil War as an extension of the Revolution. They believed they held cultural, traditional, and legal ties to the Revolution. As I’ve said before, 5 of the first 7 presidents were from Virginia, and the 2 who weren’t happened to be father and son from the same part of Massachusetts. Many prominent Southerners were related to or descended from Virginia’s founders.

So statements like this made sense to Davis’ contemporaries:

That’s basically paraphrasing the Declaration of Independence. They viewed that whole process and course of action as theirs to carry on.

The rest of that first speech is some table-setting, establishing a narrative, and laying out a few general policy points to pursue. All that was secondary to the war that everyone knew was coming. That had to be the main focus.

His second address was a little more thorough. Issued a year later in Richmond, and on Washington’s birthday, he invoked Father George and claimed him for the South.

The general theme and tenor of the speech was one of animation: early 1862 had gone poorly for the Confederates and while they had enjoyed initial success in 1861, things were looking grim. Southern Grit could carry you far but couldn’t carry the day. It was mainly their ideas and their stories and buoyed them along—they were fighting for their nation, their people, and their way of life. If slavery hadn’t been such an entrenched institution in those things, they might have had a different result.

But alas, slavery had to end, and so it did, along with the career of a man who—with a massive asterisk next to his name—was an American President.

The count remains at 47 for now—and 45 men overall.

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One of my publishers posted this on Twitter a few days ago. It’s AI, based on the manuscript for HEARTLANDERS, coming in June. This is my best (and new favorite) novel of mine. It was personal in a lot of ways, and I got to do just about everything I wanted to with it.

Just being able to start an article with “One of my publishers…” is the kind of thing I’ve fantasized about for a huge amount of time throughout my career. I started writing creatively when I was eight and I pretty much never stopped. It’s been twenty years since I attended my first writers conference in Provo, and plenty of authors there have gone on to have great success (including James Dashner, who told us about this idea he had for amnesiac kids stuck in a maze…)

The story has always been the same from the successful ones: pound the pavement, keep your nose to the grindstone, never stop writing, and you’ll eventually get to where you want. The saying is “It takes ten years to become an overnight success.” Based on my math I should have succeeded two nights ago. I watched those guys take off and patiently waited my turn, putting in my ten years.

But that’s just a cute saying. The underlying principle remains true: it takes time, and when you finally get there, people will think it was instantaneous. Make of that what you will. I’ve written dozens of manuscripts and hundreds of blog articles, several short stories, and who knows what else—I’ve been at this a long time. The success took its time in getting here.

Last year, at the age of 40, I finally sold my first full manuscript that went to press. (Go read FOSSIL FORCE, it doesn’t matter how old you are, it’s awesome. I’m working on the sequels right now.) That was after selling a short story, The Last Flight of the Gargoyle, to the same publisher (Raconteur) for an anthology. Now I have HEARTLANDERS under contract with 40 North, and a third iron in the fire that I can’t discuss yet (contracts, etc.)

Cherry on top, a publisher who previously rejected my work has since introduced me to a large journalism outlet based on what I’ve been posting here on Substack. He didn’t have to do that, but apparently the stuff I’m doing on my own is a good fit for what this outlet wants. (Gotta be vague because nothing is official yet, just in discussions, but I’m extremely stoked right now.)

From the outside, it would look like “overnight success.” I have two publishers, soon to be three, and the potential for a fourth with an ongoing arrangement of content creation. And I need to finish Fossil Force 2. And this Substack is closing in on 200 subscribers. I’ve actually got two dollars to rub together based purely off my writing.

(Thank you guys, btw. I appreciate it and I hope you keep enjoying what I write.)

As I reflect on this, I think about all the long, exhausting years I’ve poured into the craft, and why I’ve kept up with it; the truth is, I just love to read and write. I have things I want to say, feelings I want to share, and ideas I want to discuss. This is how I do it. For a dumb trucker who dropped out of college twice, even having this many people read my work is pretty cool, and I also get to sell a few books here and there.

It didn’t happen overnight. But I don’t mind you thinking so. Just read the stuff and tell me what you think. Ultimately that’s the objective. Like I told Spearman and LawDog on YouTube a few months ago: “You’ve got to love the toil.”

It’s nice to see that toil start to pay off.

Thanks guys.

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“Electoral Brawlage” examines the first inaugural address of each president in U.S. history, with some commentary and analysis. Check back on Mondays for more.

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Andrew Johnson is the third man (out of five so far) who served as president without ever winning an election.

We’ve covered John Tyler and Millard Fillmore; both were VPs who assumed the presidency after deaths in office. Johnson assumed the Oval Office after Lincoln was assassinated. Nearly a century later, another Johnson would assume office after Kennedy was assassinated. The fifth president to assume was Gerald Ford after Nixon’s resignation, but we’re not due to analyze that until August or September.

So who was Andrew Johnson?

Johnson has an interesting background. He was born dirt poor in North Carolina in 1808, never got an education, and instead was apprenticed as a tailor. When he learned enough to work the trade himself, he abandoned his engagements and went to Tennessee where he started his own operation. He didn’t learn to read until he was married and his wife taught him.

Johnson was extremely working-class. He eventually got involved in local politics under the Andrew Jackson wing of the Democrat party. He served as a mayor, a state rep, a state senator, and then a member of the House of Representatives. Then he was elected to the Senate out of Tennessee in 1857.

Here’s where it gets crazy: when Tennessee seceded, he was the only sitting senator—in the entire South—who remained Union-loyal. Naturally this garnered him some favorable status with the North, and when the army took control of the state near the end of the war, Lincoln made Johnson the temporary governor.

For both of Lincoln’s presidential runs, he picked pro-Union Democrats as his vice presidents to foster national unity; his first VP was Hannibal Hamlin, who left the Democrats to join the Republicans due to his anti-slavery stance. Hamlin, though, was a northerner from Maine. Johnson’s strong Southern ties were meant to be a unifying asset as the Civil War entered its closing years.

Also, side note, I’d never looked this up before writing this, but somehow Tommy Lee Jones is not directly descended from Andrew Johnson, despite looking exactly like him. I thought for a minute Jones was from Tennessee, because Al Gore is from Tennessee and he was college roommates with Jones or something.

Nope, turns out Tommy Lee Jones is from Texas, and there’s no known connection between him and Johnson. Or maybe Johnson is just an immortal time traveler.

De Facto Inaugural

With all that out of the way, here’s his speech.

It’s short, so take a minute and read it. What strikes me at about the halfway point is just how professional his speech is, especially for a guy who didn’t learn literacy until later in life. In a time of chaos and concern, he made a point of saying that he wasn’t laying out any national policies, he was just going to figure things out as they happened.

Since he had a long political career, he told people to look at his past for questions of how he’d govern in the future. Overall a pretty sensible take in response to such a devastating incident.

Johnson would go on to be the first president ever to be impeached, largely due to his resistance to Congress trying to punish the former Confederate States for their role in the war. He favored leniency and regularly used the limited powers of his office to veto Congress’ punishments.

Congress passed a specific act in 1867 that made it illegal for the president to fire cabinet members who had been approved by the Senate. On its face this is laughably bad and a naked violation of the separation of powers. Congress tried to impose its will on the Executive Branch by removing the president’s ability to staff his own cabinet.

The act, called Tenure of Office, was eventually repealed and declared unconstitutional in 1926—yet in the late 1860s, through the impeachment process, it was almost used to remove a sitting president for refusing an agenda of federal abuse against Southern States.

Anyways…presidential politics are crazy right now, but fret you not: they’ve been crazy for a long time.

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My Amazon page has all my novels, including the critically-acclaimed FOSSIL FORCE for young boys, and the Engines of Liberty series for all ages.

I post several times per week on YouTube.

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Find a picture from 2020 in my sketchbook.

“Electoral Brawlage” examines the first inaugural address of each president in U.S. history, with some commentary and analysis. Check back on Mondays for more. Previous installments include: Washington (1789).

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For videos of these articles and more of my book reviews, subscribe to the YouTube channel. Thank you for reading.

This is another ongoing series as I do a slow-read of THE ILIAD by Homer, translated by Rouse. Previous installments include book 1 and 2.

Will Somebody Please Kill Paris

I need you to accept that I will constantly compare The Iliad to the 2004 film Troy, and even if I’m being unfair, I’m not wrong to do so: the film could have been so much more than what it was, but in deleting the gods from the story, Wolfgang Peterson removed one of the key driving forces of the narrative.

There are also pieces missing from the overall story that The Iliad alone does not contain: when the story begins, Troy has already been under siege for eight years and just entered its ninth. It doesn’t end with the sacking of Troy, but with the defeat of Hector. The rest of what we know to be the full story is contained in other Homeric works. Thus, when the story opens, Paris (son of Priam, king of Troy—played by Orland Bloom in the movie) has already taken Helen of Achaia from her husband, Menelaus, and spirited her away to Troy. This prompts the siege.

After nearly a decade of humiliation and frustration, the Greeks propose to Troy that they end this war with a ritually-observed duel: a Greek versus a Trojan. Whoever wins gets to keep Helen, and the fight is over. Menelaus challenges Paris, who wronged him by stealing his wife all those years ago. Paris agrees. He and Menelaus deck themselves out with sweet armor, spears, shields, swords, and helmets. Then they draw lots to see who gets to chuck their spear first.

Menelaus, btw, is the younger brother of Agamemnon, and they’re both physically units. Agamemnon was criminally miscast as Brian Cox, and while Brendan Gleeson has a strong screen presence, I daresay he was wrong for the role of Menelaus. But I digress: Paris gets to chuck his spear first. It hits Menelaus’ shield and basically does nothing. Menelaus returns fire and does a little damage to Paris—nothing significant—and instead falls back on his sword, which breaks just a few times after Menelaus strikes Paris’ helm.

This is where the gods start to play their cheat cards—specifically Aphrodite flies down to Earth, spirits Paris away, heals his wounds, drops him in bed, gets him cleaned up and naked, then finds Helen down in Ilium (Troy) and takes her to Paris. Despite Helen stating more than once that she regrets turning her back on her spouse, she still gets it on with Paris, all while a very confused Menelaus is walking around town trying to figure out where the hell Paris went.

Menelaus curses Zeus for being a mean god and not delivering Paris up into his hands for just revenge; Paris, meanwhile, lies to Helen and claims he was spared by Athena, not Aphrodite. This dude causes nothing but problems for everybody and he just sucks. I’m firmly on Team Menelaus here.

In the movie, Menelaus slaps Paris around and is supposed to kill him, but Hector intervenes and says no. Things escalate from there, but that’s it—no divine intervention, nothing. It’s just a scuffle between two dudes who want to hook up with the same chick, and the younger dude’s older brother gets involved, and things escalate out of petty personal motivations.

The book, it will not surprise you, was better.

Go read my boy’s adventure novel FOSSIL FORCE, set in the Utah desert, featuring four friends who use ancient power armors to defend the surface from a hollow-earth invasion.

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April 26, 1986, 1:23:45 AM, Eastern European Time, was the stamp given to the reactor’s explosion in the HBO miniseries Chernobyl. Some other sources record the time as early as 40 seconds, or as late as 58; the thinking is that it took 18 seconds for the boron rods to lower into the reactor once the operators pressed the AZ5 button (emergency shutdown,) which they did at 40 seconds, so somewhere in that window the reactor went boom.

I watched all five episodes last month and quickly fell headlong down a rabbit hole of curiosity, anxious to learn more about the most devastating nuclear accident in the history of the industry. Among every other shortcoming of Soviet collectivism, Chernobyl was the straw that truly broke the camel’s back and caused the U.S.S.R. to completely collapse. Its effects are still being felt to this day.

What Happened?

The extremely skinny version of it is this: the Soviets, in their endlessly accelerating quest to beat the capitalist West at everything, cut corners in one of the newest and deadliest industries of the 20th Century: nuclear power. They built them fast, they built them cheap, and they built them under secrecy.

Through a complicated series of engineering steps that I can’t hope to accurately summarize here, the Soviet reactors had the capacity to become nuclear bombs under the right conditions, and as it turned out, those conditions were easier to create than one might think. Personnel, politics, and ambition all converged on that fateful April night in 1986, and the fourth reactor of four at Pripyat exploded, exposing the radioactive core to the open air.

Dangerous particles flooded the atmosphere and drifted hundreds of miles away. On-site nuclear scientists initially misdiagnosed the problem. Emergency responders showed up to put out a simple fire on the roof, and stood directly in the face of the exposed reactor, sealing their fates in minutes. Within hours the full might of the Soviet machine was mobilized to solve the biggest logistical problem they had ever seen, and had never conceived. Solutions were cooked up on the fly and most of them involved tactical human sacrifice to varying degrees.

A nation that operated day-to-day on lies and projected social power suddenly found itself face-to-face with a problem it couldn’t ignore, intimidate, or cover up: they had to cap off a reactor before it killed the entire continent with chemical poison. Soil would have to be overturned. Forests, razed. Livestock and pets, destroyed. The bodies of firemen were sealed in zinc caskets and buried in concrete. Officially the death toll is thirty-one, but the true number is well into the thousands. The financial cost of the cleanup equals over eighty billion dollars as measured against 2020s currency; the Soviets flat-out couldn’t afford it, and it destroyed them.

To say nothing of the concern that the other sixteen reactors in the country might do the same thing under the wrong circumstances.

When they finally got it under control, the Communist political machine did what it did best: lie, assign blame, and exonerate itself of any fault. The scientist who most closely oversaw the cleanup procedures, Valery Legasov, was so broken by the process that two years after the explosion—to the day, mind you—he recorded tapes of his assessment, then committed suicide to ensure someone would pay attention to his words.

He had tried to kill himself twice before this. It wasn’t a fleeting impulse; he was convinced it was the only way to break through the Party’s iron grip on the truth. Now, four decades later, we have access to a staggering amount of material to help us understand what happened in Chernobyl.

I lived through it, BUT…

I wasn’t quite two years old when reactor 4 went up. I asked my mom about it and she had some vague recollections of it in the news, but there were other big things going on in my parents’ lives that year so it kind of fell between the cracks. As I grew older and went into public school, I saw maps on the wall with “United Soviet Socialist Republic” stamped across Russia and Siberia; in second grade, I had just figured out how to spell “Czechoslovakia” in time for the country to split in two. Eastern Europe was in flux after communism collapsed, and brought forty years of Cold War tension to a close.

This year, without really meaning to, I got bit by the curiosity bug just a few weeks ahead of this anniversary and, well, I wanted to share it with you guys. This single episode in world history is like any other thing I’ve studied—the Pilgrims, the Civil War, the Wright Brothers—that we only had time to touch on in public school. Once you jump into the details, you never forget them.

What to Watch, What to Read

Obviously the first thing right out the gate is the aforementioned miniseries. The creator, Craig Mazin, suffered a bite from this same bug many years before I did, and the facts of the story inspired him to put together the pitch for the show. Fortune smiled on him and he got to make it, then see the critical response to it when it aired in 2019. I remember hearing about it back then, but I’ve never had an HBO subscription, so it faded into the cultural background for me like so many other things.

It was worth the hype. Mazin and his crew took great care to marry a cinematic narrative to the facts, and when he had to divert from the truth, he made an accounting of those facts on a podcast that aired alongside the show. The full episodes are still available on YouTube and, I assume, elsewhere.

[Content advisory: a fair amount of heavy profanity in the show, and it’s HBO, so you’re gonna see some dong in episode 3.—GB]

A few years after HBO dramatized the story, Amazon Prime put together a three-episode documentary that had a little less flair and moved at a faster clip. It’s fine, but it lacks the emotional punch of the show. This is good if you’d like more facts.

MIDNIGHT IN CHERNOBYL also came out in 2019. Mazin mentioned it on the podcast and said he wished he’d had access to Higginbotham’s manuscript when he was writing the show, because they clearly drew on the same research and it would have saved him a lot of time.

Higginbotham shares details that the show didn’t have time to portray, including the aftermath of the Chernobyl show trial that condemned Dyatlov (the head engineer in charge that night) to ten years in a hard labor camp. Despite his documented guilt, Dyatlov would spend the rest of his life trying to clear his name, to no avail.

VOICES FROM CHERNOBYL also got a shout-out from Mazin, but it’s a different treatment from MIDNIGHT; Svetlana Alexievich spent a great deal of time talking to Chernobyl survivors in the 1990s, collecting firsthand accounts of what they endured in the wake of the disaster. One survivor included a fireman’s wife, who lost a pregnancy to the fallout; others were people who lived in what would become the exclusion zone, and had to leave their family homes behind. Even for years after the fact, people from Chernobyl faced a public stigma for being from there. Wives feared getting pregnant because the baby might be deformed, and single women wouldn’t even date the tall, good-looking men from Pripyat based on the high odds that they’d produce unhealthy children. It was devastating to read but, because of its honesty, merits recording.

In Pop Culture

It was such an impactful event that it wasn’t long before artists started drawing on it for inspiration in their work. Leonard Nimoy, in recounting the history of the Star Trek movies he starred in, said that The Undiscovered Country was initially based on the idea of “Chernobyl in Space.” A valuable mine on the Klingon moon of Praxis suddenly explodes, causing so much turmoil for the Klingon Empire that they have to formally put their war with the Federation on hold to deal with it.

Other takes on the story have been less creative, including a subplot of Transformers: Dark of the Moon, wherein the Chernobyl disaster is portrayed as the result of Soviets trying to reverse-engineer Transformer technology. As much as I’m a diehard for Transformers, this was a bad idea, but I expect little else from a backup writer (Ehren Kruger) who got sloppy thirds from a couple of even worse writers (Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci.) Frankly I think it does a disservice to what actually happened at Chernobyl, but none of these writers care enough to do a good job.

There are plenty of other examples but those are the big two that I care about. Chernobyl continues to be a big deal.

Graham, why are you doing this?

Look, first of all, shut up, okay? And then, just read the books. There are going to be times when I don’t explain everything to you. There are rewards for curiosity and intellectual efforts; reading detailed books about complex subjects will teach you that, and when you’ve read up on Chernobyl (or watched the shows!) you will be enlightened, and that’s a good thing.

And second, history should be remembered. Especially the history that doesn’t have so many venerated names attached to it. The lessons of Chernobyl are the lessons of Legasov, Scherbina, Ignatenko, Akimov, Toptunov, Dyatlov, and more. If you’ve read up on the event, you can tell me even the briefest versions of their stories and you’ll know why they deserve to be remembered.

For whatever ideological disparity there is between the free west and the communists of yesteryear, I would personally agree that the heroes of the Chernobyl disaster deserve the monument that stands today at Pripyat, commemorating their sacrifice. It’s called the “Monument to Those Who Saved the World.” It may sound like hyperbole, but after reading their stories, I’m not going to argue with it.

I am, however, going to ask AI to render a slightly more pleasing version of the sculpture using art deco cues, instead of the Soviet brutalist style. Then again, it’s art by their people, of their people, for their people, so it’s up to them.

Anyways…don’t forget the lessons of Chernobyl. Don’t cut corners with fire. With the wrong kind of fuel, everything burns.

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This whole “Graham writes about the sexes” arc began when my family and I were watching Transformers One a while ago, which depicts Megatron and Optimus as friends before they became sworn enemies. My wife asked me why so many stories go that way, and I told her it’s the male version of an “enemies to lovers” romance—a trope that is very popular with The Gals.

At first I was joking, but as I thought about it, I realized I had accidentally stumbled upon one of those quiet truths. I’ve pontificated about this before so I won’t exhaust the backstory, suffice it to say that once you recognize the pattern, you see it everywhere. A male audience doesn’t mind a combative protagonist who is an enemy to most of the people in his orbit, while a female audience is predominately concerned with people getting along (even if it takes most of the book to get there.)

If you’ve just read that paragraph and you’re rushing to the comments, STOP. Seek help. Or save the therapist fee and remind yourself that this is a generalization, I don’t care about exceptions, exceptions just mean the rule exists, and this rule exists.

Highlighting exceptions is annoying for multiple reasons, not least of which because it means you’re not actually thinking about what I’m saying. This time though, I’m going to throw the Excepters a bone…

…only the bone will prove once again that this rule is a firm one.

Here’s my thesis: the 2008 film Gran Torino and the 2012 novel A MAN CALLED OVE are the same story, but the former is for men and the latter is for women.

“But Graham I’m a man and I didn’t like that movie and I liked that book and my girlfriend didn’t like the book but—”

STOP NOW. STOP. This is not the bone. Wait.

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Gran Torino

Walt Kowalski (Eastwood) is a Korean War vet from Lansing, Michigan. He used to work at the Ford factory in Detroit. At 80 he’s retired and just became a widower. His kids have all grown up and moved out of the neighborhood, which has since been taken over by the incoming Hmong (Southeast Asian) community. Walt coughs up blood, hasn’t been to Catholic confession in a while, and basically hates everything.

His kids and grandkids all suck. They’re materialistic and are more or less waiting on him to die so they can inherit his stuff—the house he’s taken care of, and the 1972 Gran Torino that he bought right off the factory line where he used to work. After his wife’s funeral, his kids try to get him to move into a retirement home, and he’s infuriated at the idea that he can’t be independent. He tells them off and they’re gone until the end of the movie.

Shortly thereafter, Walt catches a neighboring teen, Thao, trying to steal his Gran Torino as part of a gang initiation. (The Hmong community has brought gang tactics and violence to Lansing, and it has only gotten worse over the years; Walt has watched the neighborhood decay as a result, and this amplifies his pre-existing dislike of them.) Walt scares Thao off, which gets Thao in trouble with the gang, and they show up later to beat him up.

This all goes down on Walt’s lawn. He saddles up with his old M1 Garand from the war and tells the gangsters in no uncertain terms to GTFO or he’ll kill them.

The Hmong neighbors immediately take a liking to Walt (despite being cold to him before) and he begrudgingly starts to warm up to them in return. Once he realizes that Thao is being pressed by the gang and that he doesn’t have a father figure, Walt takes the kid under his wing and teaches him manly stuff.

The gangs still get up to their gang business though, and things accelerate between them and Thao—and by extension, Walt. One night the gang members rape Thao’s sister, Sue, and they draw a line in the sand. Walt and Thao saddle up for a fight, only at the last second Walt locks Thao in his house and goes to face the gangsters alone.

Walt’s finishing move is ice cold. Throughout the movie he’s been charitably harassed by his late wife’s priest from the local Catholic church, who wants him to come in and confess his sins before he dies. It’s implied that Walt is still carrying things he did during the war. Walt’s close to death due to his smoking (the coughing up of blood reminds us of this) so his clock is running out, and he knows it. The neighborhood has gone to hell, the gangs run the place, people are terrified so they all Didn’t See Nothin’, and unless someone makes a bold move, nothing will get better.

So Walt quietly gets ready to die. He buys a suit. He goes to confession. Then he draws the gangsters out to where there are plenty of witnesses, throws up a literal Hail Mary, and fakes like he’s pulling a gun. The gangsters gun him down. The neighborhood, who love Walt, all turn on the gangsters and report them to the cops, and they go down for murder. Suddenly they All Saw Somethin’.

In the wake of Walt’s funeral, his greedy family show up for The Goods, only to find that Walt left his stuff to the Hmong, and Thao has inherited the eponymous Gran Torino.

A Man Called Ove/Otto

“Ove” is pronounced like “Uva.” It’s a Swedish name, and the original book is set in Sweden. There was an American adaptation in 2022 starring Tom Hanks, and his name was changed to Otto, so for the sake of visualization I’m going with Otto from here on out. But I have read the book.

Otto lives in a close neighborhood where everybody knows everybody’s business and they’re all subject to an HOA that nobody likes. A short while after Otto becomes a widower, he starts planning his own suicide because life without his wife is not worth living. There are frequent interruptions to his suicidal plans, or they otherwise go awry, much like the 1980s John Cusack film Better Off Dead. In many ways this story is a dark comedy.

As Otto tries to kill himself, he increasingly—and against his will—gets caught up in his neighbors’ beef, and their various hijinks cause him to flashback to meaningful anecdotes in his life. Otto’s mom died when he was in elementary school and his father died when he was in high school. Otto got a job in construction so he could learn how to fix his father’s house, but right after he did so, the house burned down (no insurance) and he had to move.

Later he tried to enlist in the military but he had a heart problem that left him with the equivalent of a 4F designation. As he goes to the train station to leave, he meets a woman named Sonja who eventually becomes his wife. They start a life together and are soon expecting their first child.

Then an auto accident not only paralyzes Sonja, but causes her to miscarry, and now she and Otto will never be parents. She’s stuck in a wheelchair for the remainder of her life and becomes a teacher. In her fifties she comes down with cancer, and that’s the beginning of the end.

Otto’s life is always complicated by bureaucracy. I don’t know how this is depicted in the Hanks movie, but in the book Otto (Ove) had come to distrust “men in white shirts” as these were always the agents of bureaucracy—whether it was the housing authority, the insurance companies, doctors, or the HOA. (There is a Swedish equivalent in the book.)

Two major families in the story are neighbors who live opposite Otto: Anita and Rune on one side, and Patrick and Parvenah on the other. Anita and Rune are fellow Swedes, same ages as Otto and Sonja, and the wives were even pregnant at the same time (though Anita was able to give birth.) After Rune became a father, Otto’s friendship with him soured. Eventually Rune had a stroke, and despite Anita being able to take care of him, the Swedish HOA (mingled with some other public authority they have) tries to force her to put Rune in a care facility.

Patrick and Parvenah (she’s Iranian) are younger parents and she’s extremely pregnant, as well as being a little bit indifferent to social boundaries. (She regularly intrudes on Otto and interrupts his suicide attempts.) While annoyed and curmudgeonly at first, he warms up to the family over time, despite himself.

While the book is a series of vignettes from Otto’s life, the main conflict centers on the authorities trying to institutionalize Rune, and the neighborhood comes together to tell off the men in white shirts. They succeed, and everyone lives happily ever after, and Otto dies a few years later but not from suicide. Another young and expecting family moves into his house.

Walt and Otto are the same

You’ve got two old guys who have watched their neighborhoods change over the years, for the worse. (Walt doesn’t like the Hmong, Otto doesn’t like anyone.)

They distrust formalized authority and have far more confidence in their own skills. (Walt resists the priest’s intrusions throughout the film while Otto has a lifelong enmity with the white-shirts.)

They acquire large collections of tools and are good at working with their hands, to the benefit of their neighbors. Walt built the car he drives, and his shed is full of tools that have a purpose, which he explains to Thao, while Otto focuses on using the right tools and materials for various jobs.)

Teaching foreigners about cars plays a central role. (Walt stops Thao from stealing the Gran Torino, and then the car becomes a symbol of bonding and passing the torch. Parvenah needs to learn how to drive, so Otto/Ove shows her in a Saab, though she doesn’t want to drive stick.)

Both men soften their animosity toward their neighbors by the end, ultimately doing things that they have put off for a long time. (Walt goes to confession. Otto teams up with people for the benefit of Anita and Rune.)

In the case of Otto, we even have the trope I mentioned at the beginning, where he was friends with Rune. With their wives having synchronized pregnancies, the husbands built baby cribs at the same time. Their friendship went south mostly out of Otto’s doing, though I don’t recall it being explicitly spelled out in the text—the clear implication was that losing his unborn child cause Otto to resent his neighbor, something he would have to repent of later.

Walt, meanwhile, was never friends with the Hmong people prior to his encounter with Thao, and didn’t see them as any different from the North Koreans that he had to fight and kill more than fifty years ago. They were all Asians to him.

Walt and Otto are different

Among the first distinctions—and perhaps the most significant—is the fact that Walt joined the military and Otto couldn’t. Few things would have had a heavier impact on Walt. He regularly referenced his service throughout the film and he was rather blunt about it.

The long-awaited confession features a war story where he killed a child soldier that was trying to surrender to him, and he did so without being ordered. The psychological and spiritual toll of such an act is impossible to understand for those who haven’t done it.

The second distinction is Walt’s family; after Sonja’s accident, Otto lost the chance to become a father. After the war Walt got married and had a few sons, though again the relationship with them wasn’t a good one. Aside from the previously mentioned materialism, there was the generational divide and gap between values. Much like Otto’s resentment toward Rune, Walt resents his son for selling Japanese cars instead of American ones.

Otto does have regular blow-ups throughout the book where he loses his temper, shouts someone down, or calls out their stupid behavior. Ever-present headphones are a particular annoyance to him and he gets in his jabs on people who don’t think critically, or at least don’t think with his form of criticality. These moments contrast with the times when he restrains himself, says nothing, or just quietly glares at something. Otto at least has a brake pedal.

Walt, on the other hand, is abrasive as a baseline, and never apologizes for it. He refers to the Hmong openly, to their faces, as “gooks” and “zipperheads.” Even in a polite conversation with Sue he calls her “dragon lady” and she takes it in stride. When confronting a group of black gang members Walt calls them “spooks” and “spades,” and also tells a joke about “a colored guy,” (though he never uses the Nuclear Word, funnily enough.)

It’s this aspect of both characters that sent me down this rabbit-hole to begin with; Otto encounters a man wearing makeup and deduces that he’s gay, so he gives him (his version of) a tough time about it. Later on, Otto softens and convinces other characters to accept the man’s homosexuality. He even helps him move in with his boyfriend when during the closing chapters of the story.

Never at any point in Gran Torino does Walt have a sit-down with the Hmong and say “You know, now that I see you as human beings, I’m sorry for all those mean words I said.” That’s not what the story’s about. He’s old, he’s set in his ways, his character is shaped by his life experiences, and like any ironclad male-coded character, he’s convinced he’s right.

His arc is immensely personal and he stays true to his own values, but he has to respond to opportunities in a different way than he might have expected. His own kids turned out to suck. He got a second chance when he met Thao and could help him be a better man. In turn, this act—and the need to resolve local gang violence—got Walt over the hump with his other objections, setting him up for the self-sacrifice to save his neighborhood.

The Appeal to the Sexes:

My saying is “Women prefer peace, men prefer war” when it comes to stories. A broad stroke, I know, but generally accurate. What makes Walt Kowalski appealing to the male viewer is not the fact that he went to war in Korea, but that he’s still going to war in modern-day Michigan. He pulls his gun a few times, sure; that’s not going to win this kind of war. He has to go out in a blaze of glory, a heroic last stand, a mortal sacrifice, in order to secure victory.

He could have done this at any time after his wife’s death, what he lacked was the motivation. His family had all moved out of the neighborhood and he was effectively estranged from them anyhow. While the Hmong and their culture were somewhat alien to him, they still lived by the values he cherished, and he could save Thao from a life of crime if he could put the local gang out of commission. He just needed to be willing to die—painfully—to make it happen.

That degree of sacrifice—and the willingness to commit to it—speaks profoundly to the masculine psyche. (Michael Walsh wrote about this in his book LAST STANDS, I reviewed it below.)

One of the more persistent qualities of the movie is also its brutality with language. There’s not only a lot of profanity, there’s a lot of racial slurs thrown around that are never addressed or retracted with the sort of social pressure you see on the Internet. It isn’t that men want to go around hurling this kind of language at each other for its own sake; they just do. Yes, there are unironic racists and haters out there in the world, and they talk like that, and they have evil intent behind it. Walt’s not one of them. I might even venture to say that most men aren’t. There’s a great scene where Walt takes Thao to the barber shop to show him how men talk to each other. It’s rough, it’s brutal at times, but it just is.

(So hey, uh, language warning.)

When the movie came out in 08/09, I really struggled to see the point of this. I was 24 and wasn’t a stranger to blue-collar work. I was also an idealist when it came to matters of speech and conduct. (I suppose I still am.) But now, 18 years later, with 13 years of trucking and working with veterans in my background, there’s an immeasurable quality of truth to this that I would struggle to put into words. Men talk like this to each other. It’s just a fact. You wouldn’t talk that way to a stranger, you don’t know what you’d be in for—unless they were the aggressor, in which case you’re “clapping back” as the kids say, and that’s a different dynamic.

Doesn’t mean I like it necessarily, I just get it. That’s all. It reflects who Walt is, and he’s conditioned that way through his experiences. He fought in a war, killed people, and then spent decades in a car factory with other wrench-turners. If I published half the stuff I’ve laughed at from my veteran co-workers, most people reading this would never talk to me again. Some of those guys have no brakes and no filter.

Contrast all of this with the reading experience of A MAN CALLED OVE. The tone of the book, conveyed through the supporting characters, is that Otto/Ove is wrong for feeling the way he does about his life. Sonja was the only one who understood him and truly loved him, and to be fair, Otto had a tendency to push people away. Despite being victimized by dishonest people and indifferent bureaucrats throughout his life, he was constantly pressed to accept what was happening to him. Small wonder that he would want to check out (you should never do this though). Neighbors and others took the initiative to warm up to him and the end result was that he became involved enough in the lives of others to step out of his comfort zone.

While Walt and Otto both made sacrifices to improve their neighborhood, it was Walt who did it on his own terms while Otto ultimately accepted the terms dictated to him through social pressures. Yes, he acceded certain points through his own will; that’s just built into his character. The distinction lies in the phenomenon known as “the longhouse.” Go read that link to understand it, Lomez covered it well.

Short version: a longhouse a is system of stifling bureaucratic control instead of freedom and excellence, with the former generally administered by women and the latter generally preferred by men.

Otto joined the longhouse run by Anita and Parvenah. Walt was likewise pressed by feminine influence in the form of Vu and Sue—Thao’s mother and sister, respectively. Yet it was he who took them under his wing, and secured protection for them in his way, and on his terms, by doing something they would never have approved of. Otto didn’t like anyone at the start of the book and by the end he was telling people to accept gay marriage. Walt didn’t like anyone at the start of the movie and by the end he was willing to go out in a blaze of glory to save them.

Conclusion

The thing with art is that it’s not a perfectly measurable science. You couldn’t stick these stories in a lab and find a law as immutable as gravity that defines them. I’m playing with some loose and ethereal parameters here, which is what art requires. It’s going to say different things to people.

Nevertheless in my ongoing refinement of this thesis—women prefer peace, men prefer war—I see ways in which these stories, built with the same pieces, but for different audiences, come to different conclusions, and dividing line is by the sexes.

Gran Torino is masculine. It’s about a man who goes to war and achieves peace for his neighborhood. There’s some appeal for a female audience because the grumpy white guy helps out the minorities and gives them his stuff.

A MAN CALLED OVE is feminine. It’s about a curmudgeon who learns to be nice to people. There’s some appeal for a male audience because Otto and his friends defeat a government bureaucrat by threatening to release his browser history.

The rule is broad and general. Yet it’s a rule nonetheless.

If I needed any further proof, it was that anyone I know who’s seen Gran Torino was a guy, and the only readers I’ve heard gush over A MAN CALLED OVE were women—with one exception.

But I suspect he is coming around.

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2026 is America’s 250th birthyear. To celebrate, I’m highlighting 50+ significant American documents from our history. So far I have covered The Mayflower Compact, Patrick Henry’s Speech, The Lee Resolution, The Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, the Treaty of Paris, the Virginia Plan, The Northwest Ordinance, The Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Louisiana Purchase, the Star-Spangled Banner, the Monroe Doctrine, the Indian Removal Act, the Knickerbocker Baseball Club rules. and Lincoln’s ‘House Divided’ Speech.

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The public-school version of the Emancipation Proclamation is that Lincoln wrote it and freed the slaves during the Civil War, and we all lived happily ever after. Which is sort of fine as a starting point for first-graders but it’s nowhere near the whole story.

The National Archives link has the whole speech, as well as a pretty good foreword to explain the context of it. While the key line states that slaves in the Confederacy are “thenceforth and forever free,” that declaration only mattered insofar as the Union could enforce any law in the South.

Lincoln might as well have declared that they were all millionaires, or that Southern women were now all single; it didn’t matter to the immediate material condition of Southern slaves.

However.

To those who were able to cross territorial lines into the North, they were now guaranteed their freedom, and the rippling effect of this change would make controlling and subjugating Southern blacks a lot more difficult. There were legal and cultural reasons to do this, and they cannot be divorced from the tactical.

Personally I think this all coincided with Lincoln’s ongoing personal spiritual journey during the war. I read a book by a guy who laid out a case for this in 2020, but the book has since gone out of print and the author is…kind of a piece of crap, so I’ll probably restate that part of the argument here at a later time. Suffice it to say that Lincoln’s relationship with his faith changed dramatically during the war, and his attitude toward black Americans changed in conjunction therewith.

Yes Virginia: at the start of the war, Lincoln didn’t care about freeing the slaves. In fact he outright said he wasn’t going to. (Check the previous post from this week, it was one of the first points he addressed in his inaugural speech.) Turns out that a few hard years of war will change the way a man thinks—especially when that man is responsible to God for the ongoing existence of his country.

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