Post-it Notes and Presidential Greatness – graph at bottom

Its Monday and I have most of a whole day stretching out to review the 300ish old Not Columns I’ve written since 2002. As with my massive and or complicated snow sculptures I approach big projects with some care to prepare. I created massive amounts of work for myself since 2018 by starting and stopping a half dozen book writing projects without ever really keeping all my writing tidy. That meant that sometimes several weeks of hard writing, most in need of proofing, were shelved higgledy piggledy in the computer or in poorly organized file folders when I printed stuff out. Much of the last six or seven months has been spent organizing what wasn’t. It was difficult to make a lot of progress on this while I was substitute teaching. I might get called in three days and then have two days to write a column for the Duluth Reader. I hung up the subbing a month ago and time has been on my side. Two years ago as I approached a third run at Pete Stauber there was no book and it was almost May before I tried to get some UMD students interested in my campaign. We have almost come to Leap Day so I’m two months down with this election year but I can imagine being ready to print a book by the end of March or early April.

I have one major source of material to tap into and that is today’s project. All most all of my 300 Reader Columns were pretty carefully proof read. I’ve finished reading the 150 or so first generation of them from 2002 to 2008 and I must say it has been very satisfying to discover that much of what I’ve written was clear, even the complicated explanations of the Duluth School District’s finances as the Red Plan swallowed them whole. That was dry stuff. Its also satisfying that I find myself enjoying things I wrote that I haven’t revisited for 10 or twenty years. A lot of it reinforces my analysis today of the corruption of the virtues of Lincoln Republicanism by the opportunists and sociopaths who so easily begin orbiting a grift friendly cesspool.

That kind of description won’t endear me to fans of Donald Trump but I’m really trying to provoke one line of thought. Put simply its Pro-Trump = Anti-Lincoln.. I truly hope to find Trump lovers who think they must love Lincoln too because that’s what American history teaches all of us we must do be be good citizens but Honest Abe vs. Dishonest Don is not going to be an easy argument for people hiding in Donald Trump’s pockets to uphold.

And in this post you can see already lines I will pursue in my future Reader columns and the book that I’m pulling together. Last night I almost ran out of the post-it notes that my wife just joked about that cover my office ceiling like so much yellow and pink stubby hair. It didn’t occur to me when I began re-reading my first 100 posts to write comments on them and stick them to the paper copies I have in the three ring binders full of my old columns. I’m trying to fit them together in short segments for the book on topics I think voters are interested in. By mid week stringing them together should be much faster and I’ll be able to put them on a flash drive to give to the printers for their further recommendations prior to printing.

This really isn’t a very interesting post. I’ll file it under Harry Welty a catch all for diary like additions. But if you are one of my eight loyal readers keep the equation I just formulated in mind. You will see a lot more of it over time.
Pro Trump = Anti Lincoln

No one in my lifetime has ever disputed the ranking of Lincoln on the annual list of best and worst presidents. There are always quibbles about where any individual Prez fits on the list and over decades some past presidents have moved back and forth as much as 10 places. Recently Ulysses S Grant has moved up and that is a sign that southern racists have less influence than they did when my Grandfather when to Columbia College in 1915 to get a masters degree in History. In that year of the movie Birth of a Nation Columbia was the capitol of the lost cause history that that Donald Trump base seems so enamored of today.

Even so Lincoln has always been near the top of the list of Presidents fighting only FDR and George Washington for the highest Honor. Here’s a visual of this years ranking by historians of the Presidents. Note where the other half of my equation is positioned.

2024-02-26_10-12-24

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