| Anyone Can Be President
by Naomi Cochran
Twenty days before the oath
I dream it's me.
Chosen at random.
Standing alone
at a plywood podium.
No one wanted the job. I'm from northern Wisconsin, I say.
I don't know anything.
I just want people to tell the truth
and be kind. A man interrupts.
I put my hand over his mouth.
Be quiet, I say.
I believe I have the floor. “Anyone Can Be President” by Naomi Cochran, from The Truth about Everything: In 3500 Words or Less. Just a Thought Press © 2019. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)
Today is Cinco de Mayo, which commemorates the Mexican victory over the French in the Battle of Puebla in 1862, but is, in a more general way, a celebration of Mexican heritage and culture in the United States. After a series of wars in the mid-19th-century, Mexico was reeling. President Benito Juárez announced that payment of foreign debts would be temporarily suspended in 1861, and the French navy showed up to demand repayment. As long as they were there anyway, Napoleon III thought it would be a good idea to replace the current government with one more favorable to French interests — and France could also establish a base of operations to aid the Confederacy in the American Civil War. In a David-and-Goliath battle, the 8,000-strong, well-armed French army was routed by 4,000 ill-equipped Mexican soldiers, and though it wasn’t a decisive battle in the course of the war, it became a symbol of Mexican pride. It also kept Napoleon from aiding the cause of the Confederacy. Cinco de Mayo isn’t widely celebrated in Mexico outside the state of Puebla, but it has been adopted by many Americans regardless of their heritage, much like St. Patrick’s Day and Oktoberfest. It’s been celebrated in California since 1863, and grew in prominence in the rest of the country along with the Chicano movement of the 1940s. It wasn’t until beer advertisers decided to promote the holiday heavily in the 1980s that American celebration of Cinco de Mayo became widespread.
It’s the birthday of journalist Nellie Bly (books by this author), born Elizabeth Jane Cochran in Armstrong County, Pennsylvania, in 1864. She was 23 when she went to New York in 1887, and talked her way into an opportunity with Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World. Her assignment was to cover the notorious Blackwell’s Island Women’s Lunatic Asylum, and she went undercover, convincing doctors and judges that she was mentally ill. She was committed to the asylum and lived there in appalling conditions for 10 days. She wrote: “I have watched patients stand and gaze longingly toward the city they in all likelihood will never enter again. It means liberty and life; it seems so near, and yet heaven is not further from hell.” In 1889, she proposed a new story: She would beat the fictional Phileas Fogg’s record for a trip around the globe, from Jules Verne’s novel Around the World in Eighty Days. Traveling east, she made the journey in 72 days, six hours, 11 minutes, and 14 seconds. She was, by now, an international sensation, but The World refused to pay her any kind of bonus in gratitude for their increased circulation, and she resigned. In 1895, she left her career to marry 70-year-old industrialist Robert Seaman. When her husband died in 1904, she took over the business, the Iron Clad Manufacturing Company, and became one of the leading female industrialists in the country. Employee fraud, her lack of experience, and a series of legal troubles forced the company into bankruptcy and Nellie Bly went back to journalism. In 1914, she went to work for the New York Evening Journal as America’s first female war correspondent. She wrote from the front lines of World War I for almost five years. She returned Stateside in 1919 and died of pneumonia in 1922.
It’s the birthday of Monty Python alum Michael Palin (books by this author) born in Sheffield, England. He’s enjoyed a second career hosting travel shows for television. He began in 1980 with a series of train trips around Britain and Ireland, and in 1989, he attempted to recreate Phileas Fogg’s Around the World in Eighty Days journey using only transportation that would have been available in Fogg’s time, including hot air balloons, dogsleds, and garbage barges.
It's the birthday of the man who said, "No man is lonely while eating spaghetti": Christopher Morley (books by this author), born in Haverford, Pennsylvania (1890), the prolific author of a hundred books, including novels like Parnassus on Wheels (1917) about a travelling bookshop, and Kitty Foyle (1939), a sentimental best-seller about an Irish-American office girl. Morley said, "You can blow up a man with gunpowder in half a second, while it may take twenty years to blow him up with a book. But the gunpowder destroys itself along with its victim, while a book can keep on exploding for centuries.
Today is the birthday of Kaye Gibbons (books by this author), born in Nash County, North Carolina (1960), the daughter of a poor tobacco farmer. Her mother committed suicide when Kaye was 10 years old, and her father drank himself to death a year later. She said it was "the sort of childhood that encourages someone to either become a writer or to rob convenience stores." She went to college and started writing a novel based on her childhood, called Ellen Foster (1987). The novel begins: "When I was little I would think of ways to kill my daddy. I would figure out this or that way and run it down through my head until it got easy. ... But I did not kill my daddy. He drank his own self to death the year after the County moved me out." Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.® | 
