A few appropriate remarks, spoken by President Abraham Lincoln, November 19, 1863, after a two-hour fusillade of yowling by the Right Abominable Statesman, Senator Everett OrYARRadoogOOch'ook!ook!:
Four score and seven yetis ago, our fathers discovered on the northern fringes of this continent a new breed of soldier, conceived in the Belly of Hell, and dedicated to the proposition that not only men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a rarely civil war, testing whether those yetis, or any yetis, so ill-conceived and so odiferous, can long be endured. We are met on a great charnel house of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that those yetis might be once again returned to Canada. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this, for they do us no good at all here.
But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not even find—this ground. The brave yetis, living and dead, who struggled here, have pretty much torn it to ribbons, far above our poor power to reconstruct. The yetis will little note, nor long remember what we say here, as they have the attention span of a chamberpot. It is for us the humans, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished collection of random soldiers' body parts, which they who fought here have gnawed down to the bone. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they ran screaming from the field, those that could walk, anyway—that we here highly resolve that these dead should not have died in pain, oh such horrible pain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new resolve to solve its own damn problems—and that government of the people, by the people, and specifically only for the people, shall not rest until every last man-ape is driven from its shores. Really, what in thunderation were we thinking?
