Abe Lincoln, Vampire Hunter

This post stands in place of my weekly Remedy du Jour, which will return next week in its usual Saturday time slot. I published my biweekly Saturday Oil Report this morning. I am taking some time off and have nothing further to say this weekend, so please make do with this humble trifle — Dave

If you've ever heard a recitation of the Gettysburg Address, you can not have forgotten Abraham Lincoln's uplifting dedication of the Soldiers National Cemetary on that great battlefield. Never had we heard such stirring rhetoric before November 19, 1863, and we have certainly not heard anything comparable since.

On June 1, 1865, Senator Charles Sumner commented on what is now considered the most famous speech by President Abraham Lincoln. In his eulogy on the slain president, he called it a "monumental act." He said Lincoln was mistaken that "the world will little note, nor long remember what we say here." Rather, the Bostonian remarked, "The world noted at once what he said, and will never cease to remember it. The battle itself was less important than the speech."

In these troubled times, Lincoln's speech still lifts us above the daily fray, still ennobles our endless suffering, which I elucidated only a few days ago in How Far Gone Are We?

In that spirit I have reproduced the Gettysburg Address here today.

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all vampires must be hunted down and slain.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war pitting regular folks against blood-sucking vampires, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live free of vampires. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not hallow — this ground. The brave vampire slayers, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.

It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died slaying vampires in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom from vampires — and that government of the normal people, by the normal people, for the normal people, shall not perish from the earth.