SP
Wears a Cleveland hat.
If only. The words that haunt. If only President Lincoln hadn't gone to the theater on that cold, gray evening in April. If only he'd stayed home to play cards, or have sex with his wife, or even a prostitute. Or a dude. Whatever his fancy, if he had stayed home we could have been spared the horrors of the next century and a half (and counting). But he went, and Booth was there too, and he had a gun, and our Abe didn't. And by the end of 1862 the war was all but lost, but the Union hung on for another 3 years, slowly giving ground to the encroaching Confederate forces. If only they had signed the treaty in 1862, perhaps the Union could have removed some of the more onerous passages.
But none of that happened. Abe died, and the war was lost, and the Confederacy proved to be the true dominant force on the North American landmass. Someday perhaps the tide of history will be turned once again, but that day is somewhere on the distant horizon, and this author confesses he can't see it. Perhaps his children, or his grandchildren will see that day.
Norwegian Elkhound
3B/RF
Wears a Brooklyn hat.
Prior to the late-19th century, Norwegian Elkhounds were fairly rare in North America. Today, of course, they're on practically every street corner, pawing through the trash and trying to hump your leg. It is unclear who first brought them over from the Old World but one thing is clear - they make excellent Negro-hunters. With so many slaves fleeing to the Canadian hinterland, and with British Canada showing more and more reluctance to turn slaves over to American authorities (which reached its breaking point with the secession of Alberta to join the renamed Confederate States of North America, from which point forward a de facto state of war has existed between Great Britain and the CSNA), slave owners needed a dog that was capable of hunting your average Negro escapee. Enter the Norwegian Elkhound, particularly suited to cold-climate hunting. A militia of CSNA soldiers wandering across the 49th risks instigating a full-blown nuclear showdown with the Brits, but a single man with a pack of Elkhounds can easily track a runaway slave as far north as Great Bear Lake. In a way, the lowly Elkhound has single-handedly prevented World War IV, and for that perhaps we all owe it our thanks (and our leg).
Shane MacGowan
SP
Wears a New York(NL) hat.
The Minstrels (as they were later dubbed by a hostile Union press) first began arriving on the shores of South Carolina around 1911. Catalans, Roma, Irish. A few Kurds. All came for the same promise - to share their culture, their heritage and especially their music with the well-paying slave-owners that made up the landed gentry of the CSNA (neé CSA). That was the desire, anyway - in truth, many of them ended up as essentially indentured servants, playing shows with other Minstrels for the local slave-owner for little more than a subsistence wage. The Northern press may have called them Minstrels, and created very exaggerated, even offense, caricatures of them in editorial cartoons, but for them it was a living, and it was life.
Shane MacGowan was one such Minstrel, but even from the beginning he was different. He travelled the CSNA as Shane MacGowan and his Minstrel Band of Pogues, but he never accepted the status quo of second-class citizenship, for him or for the slaves who he saw every day tending to their masters while they watched his show. He famously lost most of his teeth as a young man, in a brawl with the son of a local slave-owner, after he allegedly referred to the man as a certain ethnic slur for white people that it is illegal to print. And his music contained many lines that challenged the unfairness of life in the CSNA, always partially hidden from his audiences with his thick Irish brogue. Though his life may have come to a tragic end due to his love of the bottle, he should be remembered for his music above all, and not as the man who's body was found lying face down in an alley in Macon, bottle of gin in hand, his time all too short on this Earth at a mere 15 years, 4 months, 22 days.
MacGowan, with his Minstrel Band in happier times. Note the line about "blacks and Paks and Jocks".
