Our Unpopular Populist

As I said in my last post, I go to a movie class every Thursday night. Everybody
seems to focus on one particular aspect of the films. My aspect is the characters. You can have a crappy film with a crappy story and a crappy budget. But if it has good characters, I don't care.

Any film with Vincent Price, Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee, Charles Lawton or Christopher Plummer... If it has any of those guys I don't care about anything else. The same goes for books and videogames -- as long as they have good characters, I don't care about the pacing of the book or the gameplay in the videogame.

That's why I'm really into history. I love studying the characters of history. I don't care about empires that rose and fell. I just care about the characters.

And that's why, with given everything I've read about history, my favorite character has been Andrew Jackson. Born into extreme poverty, his father dead before he was born, mother and two brothers dead before he was 14. A child soldier in his early teens. Captured, he refused the humiliation of cleaning a British officer's boot. Accounts vary -- he was punished for that refusal either by getting his face cut or his hand sliced to the bone. Eventually, he was worth over $100 million (in today's dollars) -- of course, he married some of that. He shot those who insulted him or his family. He enjoyed violence so much that his last words were expressions of regret that he didn't kill Henry Clay and John Calhoun.

Some men in history had a knack for cheating death. Rasputin was a good example. Andrew Jackson was in several duels. He would challenge an opponent to a duel if he insulted his wife. He would let his opponent shoot first. He would be hit, and then fire back and kill his enemy. He had several bullets stuck in him his whole life. It was rumored that you could hear the bullets rattling around in his chest.

This is just a part of why I find him so compelling.