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

asked, if diaries were capable of asking questions in the 1800s, but John Quincy wouldn’t have listened no matter
what
his diary said, because his inability to live up to the ridiculous expectations he set for himself drove him to depression, self-loathing, and intense self-punishment. The exercises that he did every day (for anywhere between two and five hours) had nothing to do with staying in
shape;
he was torturing himself for not being perfect. If he wasn’t punishing himself with sprinting or swimming against the Potomac’s current, he would soak for hours in ice-cold baths and rub his body down with a horsehair mitten, something that
sounds
adorable but is painful as all hell. John Quincy would engage in this intense level of self-punishment as
president
.
    Even though he wrote most of the Monroe Doctrine and was instrumental in negotiating the treaty that ended the War of 1812, John Quincy Adams never believed that he was doing enough. If he brings that passion to his fight with you, you can assume that he’s going to punch directly through you, then punch through whatever ground you were standing on, then punch any memories
of
you out of existence, and
then
punch himself a few times for not beating you quite hard enough.
    It wasn’t just his own body that John Quincy liked punishing; it was also his opponents. The only thing that gave him a more powerful emotional high than whipping himself with a cat o’ nine tails was fighting his opponents, especially if he was standing alone fighting
multiple
opponents. His ego was fueled by victory and self-righteousness and, as time went on, he came to be feared in Congress for his ferocity, persistence, and habit of out-shouting the chair whenever the chair tried to tell him he was out of order (probably for shouting too loud). John Quincy spent every day believing that, in this life, it was just him against the world, and he
loved
this feeling.
    He was also crazy, in case that wasn’t clear from the ice bathsand spike brush. Apparently, so much of his brain was devoted to diplomacy and naked fish races that there was no room left in that giant skull of his for the part of the brain that’s supposed to focus on reason and rationality. While president (of, it should be stressed, the whole country), Adams was approached by a man named John Cleves Symmes Jr., who fervently believed that the Earth was hollow and full of tiny civilizations. He even drew a map of a hollow Earth with a bunch of busy little civilizations made up of mole people to drive his point home.
There are mole people living beneath us
, Symmes stressed.
    Then John Quincy Adams, the Monroe Doctrine contributorthat we made president (once more,
of the whole freaking country
),
agreed with him
. He thought it was “visionary” and considered it his great fortune that
he personally
could help kick this expedition off and maybe open up trade relations
with the mole people
.

    John Quincy Adams, a man smart enough to read and put on pants and make it through every single day without swallowing his own tongue, saw a stupid map about a hollow Earth full of mole people and thought, “Hey, I bet we can
trade
with those mole people! What do moles like? Sugar? Hats? You know what, it doesn’t matter. Take a bunch of taxpayer money, go to the North Pole, and start digging.” There’s no exaggeration here. That was his actual plan.
    Thankfully, Adams left office before he could actually see this plan through, and when Andrew Jackson stepped into the presidency, he shut the project down, because even he could see that the plan fell somewhere between Arguing with Cats and Eating Your Own Poop on the Spectrum of Stupid Ideas. The plan was too insane for
Andrew Fucking Jackson
, and he was so nuts that—Well, you’ll see, I don’t want to spoil it.
    (He’s really crazy, though.)
    When he left office, Adams continued to serve his country in Congress. Fittingly, he fought and worked for his country right up until