Four score and sixty nine years ago today, our favorite President (and Daniel Day Lewis lookalike) brought forth a memorable speech, conceived in unity, delivered in Gettysburg, and dedicated to the proposition that politicians can say things in public that aren’t truly stupid.
Now we are engaged in a great intellectual crisis, testing whether that nation, or any nation, so conceived and dedicated, can long endure the potential extinction of Twinkies. We are met on a great fictional battle-field, on a frozen lake somewhere in northern Canada. We have come to dedicate a portion of ourselves to witness a ragtag bunch of vegetarian vampires, and their lupine compatriots, as they face down the autocratic and oppressive Volturi, so that they might live… and sparkle. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, consecrate, or hallow this frozen lake – partly because it is Canada, which, according to most non-Aggie scholars, is not actually a part of the United States. The world will little note the brave men and women, living and dead, who fought for our freedom, championed the rights of those less fortunate, supported the cause of equality, and courageously won for us the opportunity to inflict Big Macs and venti soy pumpkin spice caramel half-caf macchiatos on the world at large, because we’re too busy debating political faux pas and the pros & cons of a Disneyfied Star Wars. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us – that from this morass of insanity, from this primeval assemblage of persons who are addicted to Pinterest and Donald Trump, fascinated by zombies, allergic to facts, and largely unwilling to admit that Duck Dynasty is the funniest thing to ever happen to mass media, shall arise a new awareness – that this nation, under God, shall have a rebirth of humor – and that laughing at ourselves, and the timeless idea that we, the people, will no longer take ourselves so flippin’ seriously, shall not perish from the earth.