Assassinate The President

Writen by Luke Haines

I have something of a confession to make, and I'm not proud.

I'm a Wikipedia addict.

I go to meetings, I've tried wearing the patches, I even considered actually getting a life, but nothing works. I'm the sort of person who can sit and read an encyclopedia all day quite happily.

Case in point, today I was looking up various species of antelope, for no real reason, and got a decent kick out of the fact that there's a sub-species of antelope called a Dik-dik. Which, incidentally, falls into sub categories including the silver Dik-dik, Kirk's Dik-dik, and my personal favourite, Gunther's Dik-dik.

So there you are, it might be sad to read the encyclopedia, but once in a while you get a decent zoological knob joke out of it.

These little moments, in my opinion, make it worthwhile.

I'll tell you something else I've learned: Assassinations, especially historical ones, aren't as dramatic as you think.

I found this out when, for long and convoluted reasons, I looked into Abraham Lincoln, recently.

(I mean this in the historical sense, rather than in the way a proctologist would.)

If you take the accepted account of his death, John Wilkes Booth, an aggrieved anti-abolitionist -indeed, and alliteratively aggrieved anti-abolitionist - snuck into Ford's theatre where Lincoln was watching a play and shot him in the back of the head. He then leapt from the presidential box onto the stage and fled.

What actually happened, if you look at the story in detail, is that John Wilkes Booth went into Ford's theatre, moseyed around the corridors for a while (Booth worked as an actor, but apparently nobody in the theatre knew him, or, if they did, nobody thought to ask "Say John, isn't it funny that you kept talking about shooting the president and now you're here at the same time he is?!") before creeping into the presidential box (once again, this is not a euphemism) and shooting Lincoln in the back of the head. He then shouted "Sic Semper Tyrannis!", meaning "Thus, always, to tyrants!" and tried to leap majestically to the stage.

Unfortunately, one of his spurs caught in the American flag that was hung below Lincoln's box, and he fell arse-over-tit to the stage below, breaking one of his legs in the process, presumably hopping away into the night whilst muttering expletives about flags, spurs and black people.

So the first thing we can learn from this is that assassins aren't always as cool as TV makes them out to be. Also, if you're going to make a grand statement in Latin, it loses some of it's impact if you fall comically off of a ledge immediately afterward.

The most pertinent question to my mind is how nobody managed to catch an essentially one-legged man who had just murdered the head of state. It can't be hard.

I'd go so far as to bet that a number of the audience could probably have shot him without leaving their seats.

Apparently, however, nobody had the presence of mind to run after someone who was temporarily crippled anyway, so he escaped.

Lincoln, meanwhile, was still technically alive. The bullet had lodged in his brain and the wound was mortal, but Lincoln was carried across the street to a house where over the next seven hours a series of doctors assessed his condition and all agreed that he'd pretty much had it, and then, I like to imagine, began arguing about who was going to get to keep his hat.

At seven twenty-two the next morning, Lincoln was declared dead, and this is where we can learn another lesson.

There is still debate to this day about exactly what the doctor, who was also the surgeon general to the army, said. Some believe he said of Lincoln "Now he belongs to the ages." Other maintain that what was said was "Now he belongs to the angels." In all probability, it was "Bollocks. Well, I'd probably better say something for posterity…" and then one of the above statements, followed swiftly by "Dibs on his hat!"

So the second lesson is this: If you want to go down in history, try not to mumble.

Martin Luther King would probably not be so well remembered had he proclaimed "I have a dream; that mumble mffle mutter mumblefuff character!" Interestingly, King himself was shot by a man named James Earl Ray, and John F. Kennedy, whose murder has unusual parallels with Lincoln's, was allegedly shot by Lee Harvey Oswald.

So the final thing that my useless fact acquiring can tell us is that if you want your child to grow up to be a famous assassin, give him or her an extra name.

Luke Doug Haines