Until that moment, I hadn’t realized that I embarked on the project of touring historic sites and monuments having to do with the assassinations of Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley right around the time my country iffily went off to war, which is to say right around the time my resentment of the current president cranked up into contempt. Not that I want the current president killed. Like that director (of the Sondheim musical Assassins), I will, for the record (and for the FBI agent assigned to read this and make sure I mean no harm – hello there), clearly state that while I am obsessed with death, I am against it.
This quote pretty much sums up the plot of Assassination Vacation (touring sites related to these three assassinations) and its tone (contempt). As a Canadian, I have no "skin in the game" when it comes to the current hyperpartisanship in the United States, but as a fairly conservative person (and by Canadian standards that's nowhere near Tea Party Republicans) the partisan attacks in this book read as churlish and unbalanced. More examples:
That's what I like to call him, "the current president." I find it difficult to say or type his name, George W. Bush. I like to call him "the current president" because it's a hopeful phrase, implying that his administration is only temporary.
Near here, on the far side of Cuba, more than six hundred prisoners of the War on Terror, a few of them child soldiers under the age of seventeen, are, by executive order, incarcerated at the U.S. base on Guantanamo Bay for who knows how long for who knows what reasons in what Human Rights Watch has called a "legal black hole".
By pulling the troops out of Dixie, the Republicans were selling out the freed slaves. Which makes the Compromise of 1877 one of the tourist attractions on the road to watching the party of Lincoln morph into the Republican Party we all know and love today.
As a Democrat who voted for Al Gore in the 2000 presidential election, an election suspiciously tipped to tragic Republican victory because of a handful of contested ballots in the state of Florida, I, for one, would never dream of complaining about the votes siphoned in that state by my fellow liberal Ralph Nader, who convinced citizens whose hopes for the country differ little from my own to vote for him, even though had those votes gone to Gore, perhaps those citizens might have spent their free time in the years to come more pleasurably pursuing leisure activities, such as researching the sacrifice of Family Garfield, instead of attending rallies and protests against wars they find objectionable, not to mention the money saved on aspirin alone considering they’ll have to pop a couple every time they read the newspaper, wondering if the tap water with which they wash down the pills is safe enough to drink considering the corporate polluter lobbyists now employed at the EPA.
That last quote is fairly representative of Sarah Vowell's humour and I think that a reader will find her funny to the extent that one agrees with her politics. I do understand the political climate at the time of this book's writing (2006) and the hopelessness Vowell felt at having her country hijacked by what she found to be a distasteful agenda, but I'm sure it's the exact same way that Republicans feel right now under President Obama (who, by the way, hasn't quite found a way to close down Guantanamo Bay yet. And don't get me started on what an environmental hypocrite the Nobel Prize and Oscar winning Al Gore has turned out to be.)
When Vowell isn't venting her spleen and sticks to her stated purpose of visiting sites and monuments related to the three selected assassinations, travelling from Alaska to the Florida Keys, she provides interesting information and paints vivid pictures of the places she visits, with an especial fondness for the period-costumed tour guides in significant homes. The overall structure, however, is pretty random and scattershot, with a fairly comprehensive section on Lincoln and much less information on Garfield and McKinley. Personally, I found it very odd that Vowell didn't include the only other assassinated president; why write about three out of four? As the New York Times book review says: Having made the commercially courageous decision to avoid the catnip that is the Kennedy name, Vowell restricts her gaze to America's first three presidential murders: those of Abraham Lincoln, Garfield and William McKinley. Was this a courageous decision, would all things Kennedy overwhelm the stories of the other presidents, or did Vowell leave out the Democrat for partisan reasons? The fact that she doesn't explain the omission is passing strange to me, but as we are following Vowell as she determines what sites would interest her next, we must allow her to set the agenda. Not all the whistlestops were equally interesting to me, and like Vowell's sister, I often mentally "stayed in the car" as she explored. I was, however, interested in the information about Robert Todd Lincoln:
Abraham Lincoln's oldest son, Robert Todd Lincoln, was in close proximity to all three murders like some kind of jinxed Zelig of doom. The young man who wept at his father's deathbed in 1865 was only a few feet away when James A. Garfield was shot in a train station in 1881. In 1901, Robert arrived in Buffalo mere moments after William McKinley fell. Robert Todd Lincoln's status as a presidential death magnet weighed on him. Late in life, when he was asked to attend some White House function, he grumbled, "If only they knew, they wouldn't want me there."Also included was information about scandals and mismanagement Robert Todd Lincoln was involved in while he served out his own political career (unhidden spoiler/tease: cannibalism!), and Vowell even singles him out as a better target for the anarchist Leon Czolgosz, who shot McKinley. In the same vein, Edwin Booth (brother of John Wilkes) keeps making appearances: He once rescued Robert Todd Lincoln from the train tracks where he had fallen and at the moment pallbearers carried Booth's coffin from a church in New York City, the interior of the Ford Theater in Washington collapsed, killing 22 federal employees who were working in the converted office space. I liked these odd and fateful events even better than the well known coincidences that link the Lincoln and Kennedy assassinations (an early exposure to these links, in LP form, started Vowell on her lifelong fascination with the subject of presidential assassination).
I liked this book less than Unfamiliar Fishes, but I didn't hate it, so I wouldn't say it warrants only two stars. It has, however, turned me off Sarah Vowell and I don't think I'll be reading her further. As a liberal-elite-atheist-memoirist, her humour and worldview isn't reaching me, and although I made the same complaint of hyperpartisanship about David Sedaris' latest book (Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls), his vignettes are redeemed by their overall atmosphere of gentleness and thoughtfulness. Assassination Vacation, to a reader like me who doesn't have a bone-deep hatred of George W. Bush and the Republican party, comes off as bitter and a little mean. I'll end with the same quote I shared from The Dinner that I linked with David Sedaris, David Rakoff, and Jon Stewart, intellectual compatriots of Sarah Vowell's who are losing their ability to amuse me, as it sums up the times for me:
The principal was probably against global warming and injustice in general. Perhaps he didn't eat the flesh of mammals and was anti-American or, in any case, anti-Bush: the latter stance gave people carte blanche not to think about anything anymore. Anyone who was against Bush had his heart in the right place and could behave like a boorish asshole toward anyone around him.It's this assumption that a person is on the right, the smart, side of history when opposing an unloved administration that led to at least two of these three murders (Garfield's assassin was likely insane), and it's a position that I found Vowell to be too cosy with, weighing the whole book down for me.
