would be, if elected, either 1) the first Vice President with a beard since 1933 or 2) the first Vice President with a beard since U.S. Grant's Schuyler Colfax.
Both wrong.
The Vice President who left office in 1933 was Charles Curtis, and he had not a beard but a mustache:
Facial hair, yes; beard, no.
The most recent Vice President with a beard was not Colfax, who left office in 1873, but Charles W. Fairbanks, who left office in 1909 and looked like this:
Fairbanks shaved his cheeks, leaving his beard unattached to his top-of-head hair, but lots of men even today wear beards like that; they're still beards.
Incidentally, Vance's beard is nothing like Lincoln's. Lincoln shaved his mustache. Look:
He probably did that because in his day the mustache was firmly associated with military men, and even with a beard (which the archetypal military man did not wear), he didn't want to be associated with the military, resulting in a style of beard most associated with clergymen. Or, more recently, with this guy:
No, the other beard-wearer whom Vance most closely resembles is this guy:
Stephen Colbert suggested that, since DT couldn't choose that guy as his running mate, he picked the closest thing available, the one who'd play him in the Lifetime movie.
Two more things about Vance:
First, he's one of those people who gives Tolkien fandom a bad name. To political criticisms of Tolkien like Michael Moorcock's I have traditionally responded, "Tolkien isn't asking you to vote for him." Well, Vance is the kind of guy who doesn't realize that Tolkien isn't asking you to vote for him.
Second, Wikipedia is currently disputing the question of whether he should be listed as J.D. Vance, J. D. Vance, or JD Vance. Really they are.
"he's one of those people who gives Tolkien fandom a bad name" — Maybe, but not nearly so much as Rachel Maddow, who she said on MSNBC that:
ReplyDelete"Lord of the Rings is sort of a favorite cosmos for naming things, and cultural references, for a lot of far right figures and alt-right figures.... Mr. Vance when he founded his own venture capital firm, named after a Lord of the Rings thing, named Narya, which you can remember because it's Aryan, but you move the N to the front."
I'd also note that Tolkien isn't asking you to vote for anyone, period. You don't vote for kings, after all.
But Maddow is not here claiming to be a Tolkien fan. What she's engaging in is merely the same sort of cheap wordsmithery that has led people to claim that "Nazgul" is derived from "Nazi-ghoul" or that, defiant of chronology, Gandalf got his name from James Gandolfini (this was actually suggested to me). That's run-of-the-mill stupidity; it says nothing about Tolkien fandom.
DeleteTo your last line, the only possible response is "Listen, strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony."
No, but she is nonetheless giving them, and Tolkien, a bad name.
ReplyDelete“Help, help, I’m being repressed!"
As I was trying to point out, there's a lot of that, and at least individually it's trivial, coming as it does from random ignoranti. But a self-proclaimed Tolkien fan, someone who's read the works and ought to know better, misusing him so badly as reported in the link: that's what really hurts.
DeleteBy “self-proclaimed Tolkien fan” you mean Vance, yes? If so, how does the link show Vance “misusing” Tolkien? From what I see, all that is reported is that Vance said he was a fan and that "a lot of my conservative worldview was influenced by Tolkien growing up”. The rest is other people’s speculative take on how Tolkien may or may not relate to Vance. And nowhere does Vance indicate that he thinks Tolkien is "asking you to vote for him” (or for anyone else).
Delete