• Abraham Lincoln
    By Austin Sims
    So basically Abe Lincoln is the american version of Ghandi or Yoda. This dude is mystical wise, in a way that could never be understood by a modern american, because of the way he grew up. In a time without schools made of brick, and houses made of drywall, education meant learning the most core essentials of calculation, and reasoning. Strong fundamental basics mean strong cognitive capability or as Mr. Miyagi (a.k.a Pat frickin' Moritta) would say, "Roots; strong."
    Abe Lincoln was the first guy to ever say, "Yeah, I'm cool with the brothers," while playing a saxophone in an auditorium full of foreign embassadors. And he looks totally bitchin' in his hat.
    On top of drafting the emancipation proclamation and appointing the general who won the civil war while he was hammered drunk, Lincoln is also responsible for a public service that was quite popular until the turn of the millenium. You may have heard of them, they're called banks. He was born and grew up on the frontier and he helped build his family's house when they moved to the sangamon county where he would later in his life start his political career. He was known as a hard worker by everyone around him. Before becoming a member of the house of representatives he had both a depot for goods and his own law practice. It is a common misconception that both of these industries failed. Lincoln abandoned both of them to start his political career.
    After Lincoln was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth in Ford's Theatre, everyone was super-bummed because he was the equivalent of that one guy that everyone liked in school who died in a car accident or committed suicide or something. They had to make a second casket just for his balls. Keep in mind this is the guy who when the south in their drunken, sort-of-incesty, (is that a word?) slave-keeping rage, said "We're seceding!" looked them straight in the eye, and said "Like hell you are."
    All kidding aside imagine an America without Lincoln. Abe Lincoln did for civil rights what the renaissance did for academia. He made the modern world possible. If you hopped into your time traveling Delorian and capped Abe Lincoln's grandfather, who was also named Abraham, and who was a captain in the American Revolution, before he could ever conceive Abe's father, Thomas Lincoln, who knows what the modern world would be like? I like to think there would be nazi-dinosaurs.
    Abe Lincoln had a natural gift as a thinker and a speaker, and was an avid reader. It is a known fact that when he read he would speak aloud everything he was reading in a loud and clear voice regardless of and to the perturbance of whoever his present company may have been at the time. His own reason for this? He was under the persuasion that by reading the words aloud not only was he absorbing the material visually but also audially, by means of his own voice. His wife Mary, who was also one of those old-timey school marms, saw merit in this practice and started incorporating it in her classroom, and others followed the first ladies example until it was a commonplace practice in American schools. TL;DR: ABRAHAM LINCOLN INVENTED READING OUT LOUD IN CLASS.
    Remember every time you where in a class reading and you'ld already read ahead and finished the story so you decided to take a nap because you where up until 5:14 a.m. when you passed out from huffing ether the previous night? No? Just me? Alright. Well anyways, anytime you where ever sleeping while another student read aloud, and then the teacher singled out you to pick up where he left off by calling your name and giving you a smug look of shaudenfreud satisfaction as you stumbled to oblige him? You can thank Abe Lincoln for that.
    If not for Abe Lincoln the audio book would have never existed and instead of listening to Stephen King short stories on rides to my grandma's while imagining a dude running alongside the car dodging obsticals, I would have been listening to my grandma's crappy church music and very well could have ended up going on a church-music-induced-rage-fueled rampage that would have made columbine look like a toddler stubbing his toe. If that seems highly unlikely to you then you have never heard my grandma's church music.
    Speaking of bad music, Abe Lincoln lived and died without EVER seeing a doorknob. Abe was born February 12, 1809 and died a few hours after Booth attacked him with a HAMMER (Boothe didn't use a gun because as he said himself "It would be disrespectful to kill a man of such stature with such a lithe and devious weapon as a firearm." wink on April 16, 1865. The doorknob was not invented until 1878, thirteen years later.
    Just because I feel like it deserves its own paragraph let me run that last little factoid by you again: Abe Lincoln had the back of his head smashed in by a man who had to much honor to use a gun. Do you know who else is notorious for having to much honor to use a gun? Jedi. John Wilkes Booth was a Jedi.
    More lesser known facts about Lincoln's life include but are not limitted to: He bested a famous professional wrestler while on a working trip with his brother who sought him out because of his reputation as a brawnish and world class grappler.
    Another fun fact related to Lincoln has to do with his son, Robert Todd Lincoln, and the brother of the Jedi/Hammer-Enthusiast who killed him, Edwin Booth. Edwin was not as remembered by the American History books as well as his brother, but he is remembered even better by a different section of history; The history of the American theatre. Edwin Booth was the premier shakespearean actor for the late eighteen-hundreds and the first half of the nineteenth century, and had a status described as "Mythic." He was basically equal parts Robert DeNiro, Clive Owen, and Johnny Depp.
    Lincoln's children had a reputation for being unruly. His youngest son, Tad, was known to interupt presidential meetings, collect wild animals and let them run unrestrained through the white house, charge high ranked officials exorbitant prices to let them see his father, and drive away his tutors with cruel pranks that often ended up injuring them in one way or another.
    While Robert was not anywhere near as bad as his younger brother Tad he still managed to get himself in his fair share of trouble, and had it not been for Edwin Booth he would have been crushed by about two tons of it one night when he was pushed off a platform at a busy train station. He describes the event in his own words...
    "The incident occurred while a group of passengers were late at night purchasing their sleeping car places from the conductor who stood on the station platform. ... There was some crowding, and I happened to be pressed by it against the car body while waiting my turn. In this situation the train began to move, and by the motion I was twisted off my feet, and had dropped somewhat, with feet downward, into the open space, and was personally helpless, when my coat collar was vigorously seized and I was quickly pulled up and out to a secure footing on the platform. Upon turning to thank my rescuer I saw it was Edwin Booth, whose face was of course well known to me, and I expressed my gratitude to him, and in doing so, called him by name."
    So imagine you've just picked up two hookers that you are about 73% sure are females from central park, and now your down in the subway station waiting for the D train to take you all back to your studio apartment, which is all you can afford because you keep accidentally blowing all your cash on transvestite prostitutes, and mescaline. While you're patiently waiting for the train to take you to Bone-Town someone behind you who is hurredly shoving their way through the crowd knocks you down off the platform onto the tracks.
    As you stair into the face of certain death that is a single shining high beam headlight attatched to a giant a** hunk of metal that is hauling a** directly at you're mescaline emaciated frame, you pray to god that if he gets you out of this you'll stop porking trannies, doing mescaline, huffing keyboard cleaner, and go to law school like you promised your grandma you would do before she died. What granny don't know won't hurt her.
    Just as you lose control of your bowels and forcefully and embarassingly soil yourself, someone grabs the collar of your douchey v-neck shirt and hauls you to safety with only moments to spare. You turn around to thank your rescuer and standing in front of you is CHUCK NORRIS.
    That's the equivalent of what happened to Robert Lincoln. Except for maybe the parts about hookers, mescaline, subways, and Chuck Norris (but I went ahead and left them in there because I think it helps get my point across.)
    Lincoln's legacy is far to vast and austere to be compiled into a few short pages. But one can touch on the key points and give a succinct idea for the kind of man he was. He is the man who saw the U.S. through it's greatest internal conflict, the Civil War, and who through it all perserved the Union, and abolished slavery with the 13th amendment. He delivered an enormous amount of influential speeches some of the most noteworthy of which are, the Gettysburg Address, the Peoria Speech, the Preservation of the Union speech, the Address to the People of Sangamon County.
    So what would America be like without Lincoln? If Lincoln never exists the Civil War could have easily ended with the South successfully seceding from the Union. There would be a Confederate States of America, and a North American Union instead of a United States of America. So when Hitler rises to power there's nobody to defeat his reich and stop him from world domination. That's assuming that we'ld even make it out of WW1, which was, at least in regards to America, practically entirely funded with bank bonds. Hm... didn't Lincoln have something to do with the bank? So without Lincoln, Hitler is in control of the world, with endless resources and power, to unleash on the defenseless common man as he sees fit. Also: Nazi Dinosaurs.
    So to recap, from the moment Abraham Lincoln was born to the moment he was cut down before his time by a hammer-weilding Jedi, he was leaving an impression on this world that would never allow him and his amazing accomplishments to be forgotten. He was the prodigal son of the American Frontier, and he brought the dream of freedom to fruition for countless peoples of African descent in bondage. He re-wrote the constitution to allow amnesty to all people who would seek to come to the land of the free, which directly would contribute to turning us into the cultural melting pot that we are. He defeated a famous professional wrestler in a match which was sprung on him by surprise, without any preperation. He did all of this without ever using, or even seeing, a doorknob.