Tag: Zachary Taylor

Fight It Out

Friday morning and the office is closed for the holiday today, so no work-at-home chores for me today. Sparky let me sleep a little later this morning and I definitely didn’t want to get up this morning, either. I feel a bit worn down today, and a bit foggy, but I’ll be fine once I shower. I was able to leave work early yesterday and run a few errands on the way home (my medication arrived in the mail; had to get another prescription; and pick up my dry cleaning) but I did feel a bit wrung out when I got home. I did some chores (laundry, dishes) and we started watching Margo’s Got Money Problems but didn’t really care much for it, and thus gave up on it. I want to read a bit this morning and do some cleaning around here, and hopefully get some writing done as well. I want to work on newsletters today, too–I have my entry about A Violent Masterpiece to share, and I also want to write about the weirdness of this holiday weekend. They haven’t issued a heat advisory for us yet, but it’s still possible. It currently “feels like” 104 and it’s not even nine yet. There’s a possibility of thunderstorms this afternoon, too. I may have some things delivered today, to get it out of the way so I don’t have to go outside other than to take out trash. That sounds like a lovely plan to me.

It’s hard for me to believe and wrap my mind around the idea that the Bicentennial was fifty years ago; the summer I turned fifteen and was about to start my junior year of high school, starting over again in Kansas, where I stuck out like a sore thumb the moment I crossed the threshold. This is the summer I turn sixty-five, and the country is in a very different mood this time around. Apparently, Ba’al is planning to give an epically long speech tomorrow at the Great American State Embarrassment, and is threatening to go as long as he possibly can to prove that he did. No incumbent president has ever died on July 4th, but at the very least his make-up is going to run–and no telling what will happen to his rat’s nest. However, President Zachary Taylor went to a lengthy celebration of the 4th on a very hot humid day, ate some cold milk and cucumbers to cool down, and got sick and died a few days later.

Dare I dream?

Essence is also this weekend here in New Orleans, and I hope that it’s back to its best form; there were a lot of complaints and some scandals in recent years. Louisiana racists hate Essence Festival (just as they hate Bayou Classic weekend, another Black event), and were pretty gleeful about its possible demise the last couple of years (there are also Quarter businesses that close both weekends, but they’re not racist, wink wink),so here’s hoping its back to form this year and rebuilds back bigger and better than ever before.

The battle between New Orleans and Louisiana rages on, with a grand jury here indicting our criminalistic conservative skank Attorney General for, among other things, abuse of power. Our lovely governor has promised to “pardon her instantly” for any convictions she may get in New Orleans…(that MAGA love and respect for the law and the Constitution on full display here, may they both burn in their own hells for all eternity)…yet conservatives called Huey Long a dictator…when Huey never pulled any of this kind of shit on his own, and he and his candidates always won in landslides. At least the day to day people loved Huey because he fought the 1% to benefit the people–which our modern day demagoguery can’t be bothered with.

I’ve been listening to some old favorites lately in the car as I drive to and from work and around town–albums by Fleetwood Mac, Stevie Nicks, and Pat Benatar from my youth and most of them still hold up today and could be hits. Some of Stevie’s 1980s albums are very much of their time, vastly over-produced like the most excessive Bonnie Tyler hits of the period, unfortunately; I’d love to hear them remade with a more timeless production style.

And on that note, I am going to get cleaned up and head into the spice mines for the day. I need to do some chores, and I need to get the kitchen and my workspace back under control. I hope you have a lovely Holiday Eve, Constant Reader, and I hope to see you again here tomorrow morning on the nation’s birthday. Until then, Constant Reader!

Man of Constant Sorrow

This week a new anthology with a story by one Gregalicious is dropping, The Faking of the President, edited by Peter Carlaftes and from Three Rooms Press. Three Rooms also produced the 2018 St. Petersburg Bouchercon anthology I edited, Florida Happens, and thus it was lovely to be working with Peter, Kat, and the Three Rooms Press gang again. The book has turned out to be absolutely lovely, and I couldn’t have been more pleased to be asked to write a story for this.

The concept behind the book was, of course, to create noir stories built around a president. I was torn at first when asked to choose a president; there were any number of them that I truly like and admire….yet so many mediocrities. The 1850’s, the lead up or prelude to the Civil War, has been of particular interest to me of late, and I decided to chose someone from that period, where we had a string of mediocre presidents take up residence in the White House: Zachary Taylor, Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, and finally James Buchanan. Buchanan is widely considered to be (or was considered to be, YMMV) the worst president in American history; he was the last president before Lincoln’s election and the outbreak of the Civil War. Buchanan did nothing to stop the coming eruption of war; if anything, he exacerbated the ill feeling between the two sections of the country. All the 1850’s presidents were Yankees with Southern sympathies; they were called “dough-faces” at the time (I don’t know why that particular term was used; so don’t ask. Google is your friend), and yes, many parallels between that time and our present day kind of exist, if you care to look to see them. Buchanan also conspired with the worst Chief Justice to ever lead our Supreme Court, Roger B. Taney, in the court decision that flamed the fans of regional hatred into an unforeseen heat that made the war even more inevitable than it already had been; Buchanan and Taney thought they were putting the slavery question to bed once and for all with the Dred Scott v. Sandford decision; by striking down the Missouri Compromise and the Kansas/Nebraska Acts as unconstitutional, the two attempted to make slavery the law of the land and permissible in the vast unsettled (by white people) territories as well as make it legal in the states that prohibited it.

Yeah, that kind of backfired.

Buchanan was also the only president who never married; and while there is certainly no proof or evidence that is conclusive, it is widely suspected that Buchanan was our first gay president. He lived, for example, for a long time with Senator Rufus King of Alabama; Andrew Jackson jeeringly called Buchanan “Aunt Fancy”; and their surviving letters bespoke an affection and longing between the two that went a bit deeper than being just good buddies. So, as a gay writer, I decided to write about Buchanan. But writing a period story set in the DC of the late 1850’s seemed a bit much and certainly more than I could handle; plus I couldn’t really come up with a plot. I thought about having Buchanan murder a slave he’d been forcing to be his lover and the ensuing cover-up; I made several abortive attempts at writing that story before finally abandoning the idea.

I had no idea what I was going to write–until I read an article on-line somewhere about Buchanan’s mysterious sexuality and sexual preferences, and the author said something along the lines of but for some historians, short of finding daguerrotypes of Buchanan naked with another man, nothing will ever serve as conclusive proof for the deniers.

And there it was. I started writing “The Dreadful Scott Decision.”

faking of the president cover

 

The cheap whiskey tasted like flavored turpentine, burning so intensely as it went down it felt like it was leaving scorch marks in its wake. Scott Devinney was just high enough from the joint he was smoking to consider that a plus—a sign that he was still alive no matter how numb he felt.

He was sitting in the dark in his cheap apartment near campus, streaming the panel he’d been on at the presidential historians’ conference at UCLA the previous weekend. It had aired live on a PBS network in Los Angeles—it took him a while to figure out how to access it, and now that he was watching it was even worse than he feared. He’d always suspected Pulitzer prize-winning historian Andrew Dickey was a homophobe; his behavior on the panel proved it without question.

Alas, Scott allowed Dickey to get under his skin. He wasn’t proud of that, and his doctoral advisor, Dr. Keysha Wells-Caldwell—also head of the department at UC-San Felice—wasn’t happy, either.

He wasn’t about to apologize to Andrew Dickey, though. He’d die first.

“You have no proof!” Dickey wagged his finger at Scott on the computer screen, his face reddened and his voice raising. “Just like the activists who try to claim Lincoln was gay without proof, there is no proof Buchanan was, either, no matter how bad you want him to be!”

He sighed and closed the window. He didn’t need to watch himself screaming in rage, embarrassing himself and the university in the process.

Which was what Keysha really cared about.

At one time, I seriously considered becoming a historian. I’ve always loved history, have loved to read it and study it,  and even write it (I still would love to do a Tuchman-like study of regnant women in the 16th century called The Monstrous Regiment of Women), but as with so many other things, poor professors in college stomped that desire right out of me. (The other problem, of course, being that I could never decide on a period to specialize in–although if forced I probably would have chosen the 16th century) I have heard, over the years, from friends who work in academia as well as reading books and so forth set in the academic world, how cutthroat and nasty the war over tenure can be; office politics as played by the Borgias or the Medici. My story “Lightning Bugs in a Jar” was sort of set in the academia milieu; I even considered writing a series about a college English professor at one time–it’s still there on the backburner; I may write it still. One of the novels I wrote under a pseudonym was set at a quasi-Seven Sisters style college in New England, and of course, my Murder-a-Go-Go’s story “This Town” was about sorority girls, and of course several Todd Gregory novels were set in fraternities.

So, what better idea for this story than a gay Buchanan historian, attempting to prove to the world that Buchanan was, indeed, the first gay president? And how far would he go to get that proof–which is the noir angle I needed for the story? And so the story was born…and you can order a copy here, or from any retailer.

And as you can see from the cover above, there are some fantastic writers who contributed to this book. I am very pleased to be sharing the table of contents with these amazing writers, and a bit humbled. Check it out–you won’t be sorry!