How to Fight Presidents: Defending Yourself Against the Badasses Who Ran This Country (6 page)

As you prepare for your fight with President Monroe, remember to work his left shoulder. That’s where he was shot, and that bullet stayed there throughout Monroe’s whole life (most modern doctors recommend taking bullets
out
of the body). Avoid his punches, which will likely be very painful (he was tall and rugged, and everyone who
met him talked about his “great physical strength and endurance”). If the fight comes down to a battle of wits, you could probably outsmart him. Monroe was a good president, but he simply wasn’t gifted with a brilliant mind, like Adams or Jefferson or you (hopefully). He was described by Aaron Burr as “incompetent … naturally dull and stupid … extremely illiterate … indecisive to a degree that would be incredible to one who did not know 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 never
satisfied. 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 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 baths
and 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 contributor
that 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 he was hit with a massive cerebral hemorrhage literally in the middle of answering a question in the House of Representatives. He was about to answer a question from the Speaker of the House when his brain, disappointed that all of the
other
brains get time off occasionally, just gave up and said, “Nope. We’re done here.”

Let’s hope, for your sake, that his brain is feeling similarly lazy during his fight with you.