How to Fight Presidents: Defending Yourself Against the Badasses Who Ran This Country Read Online Free PDF

him … [and] far below mediocrity.” It was said that because of Monroe’s stupid brain, he couldn’t “shine on a subject which is entirely new to him.” Unfortunately for you, fighting
isn’t
completely new to Monroe, but still, some quick outside-the-box thinking might be your best friend in this fight (maybe try to throw him off his game by yelling something wacky or kissing him, right before you start brawling. Just spitballing, here).

At the age of eight, John Quincy Adams was made the man of his house while his father, John Adams, was off doing important John Adams things for America. This would be a lot of terrifying responsibility at any time in American history, but it just so happens that, when Adams was eight years old, the
Revolutionary freaking War
was happening right outside his house. The house he had sworn to protect. He watched the battle of Bunker Hill from his front porch, according to his diary, worried that he might be “butchered in cold blood, or taken and carried … as hostages by any foraging or marauding detachment of British soldiers.” I don’t have the diary I kept at age eight, but I think the only things I worried about was whether or not they’d have corndogs in school the next day and if I had the wherewithal and clarity of purpose to collect all of the Pokémon. John Q, on the other hand, guarded his house, mother, and siblings during wartime.
    This isn’t to imply that eight-year-old John Quincy Adams could have beaten eight-year-old you in a fight, but to imply that eight-year-old John Quincy Adams could beat you
as an adult
.
    This experience, coupled with the fact that his father was John “I’m the President So If You Grow Up to Be Anything Other Than the President Also It Will Be Viewed as a Tremendous Disappointment” Adams (they can’t all be as catchy as “Old Hickory”), inspired in Quincy his intense drive, sense of duty, and unstoppable quest for perfection in the pursuit of serving his country and living up to his father’s high expectations. He was the private secretary and interpreter for the American minister to Russia at fourteen, secretary at the Treaty of Paris at sixteen, has held more diplomatic posts than any other American politician, and is the only president who served in Congress
after
his presidency.
    As he got older, Adams only got
tougher
(he exercised regularly, swimming the width of the Potomac at 5 a.m. every single day, even as a fifty-eight-year-old president), and
more intelligent
(his skills as a diplomat are legendary), and
more naked
(he exercised, swam, and took walks in the nude, and called the art of having sex outside “in the open air, with the thermometer at Zero” a distinctly “Yankee invention”). It’s a wonder that he even found time to have freezing-cold outdoor sex in between all of his exercising and working, but TV wasn’t invented yet and folks had to occupy their free time
somehow
. John Quincy chose to bone in the snow and tell people how American it was, apparently.
    This makes him a very, very dangerous opponent in a fight. I mean, right? There’s a fearlessness and confidence inherent to being “the most naked president” that seems like it would really make him a force to be reckoned with in a fistfight. Also he kept an alligator as a pet, right in the White House. That too feels like something that might come up in battle. Like if you were walking down the street and saw a naked guy with an alligator on a leash, you probably wouldn’t want to fight him, because to hell with that. That guy is John Quincy Adams, and it’s too late, because you’re already fighting.
    Driven by his father’s accomplishments, John Quincy was neversatisfied. At sixty-five, he wrote in his diary that his “whole life [had] been a succession of disappointments. I can scarcely recollect a single instance of success to anything that I ever undertook.”
What about that time you were president?
, his diary would have