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Souvenir: Lincoln, The Great Emancigator
December 28, 2008
When it comes to Abe Lincoln, tourist attractions haven’t been shy in finding ways to cash in and merchandise. We’ve seen all manner of misshapen statuary of our 16th President, commemorative plates, paperweights, and trashy keepsakes. Unlike Elvis Presley, there is no surviving estate with a lawyer army to crush off-brand souvenirs. But Lincoln is a brand that just can’t be diluted or damaged…
We really like this souvenir Lincoln grabber head for a couple of reasons: 1) The plastic grabber-on-a-stick, once confined to gator and shark heads, has made the species and logic leap to human heads. 2) It was one of the less expensive items at Springfield, IL’s Abraham Lincoln Presidential Museum. 3) It’s garish, obnoxious, and probably the most “wrong” thing to take away after your museum-borne epiphanies about Lincoln’s life and meaning.
Yes, it’s really for kids (picture junior chomping daddy’s ear with it while he’s accelerating onto the interstate), but that’s never stopped us before.
And it’s more disturbing in quantities.
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3 Responses to “Souvenir: Lincoln, The Great Emancigator”
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January 31st, 2009 at 10:36 am
And yet somewhere some day some grown child will think of Honest Abe quite fondly quite possibly solely *because* of this very treasure..
It is *TOO* funny..
February 9th, 2009 at 9:12 am
My husband and I went to the Lincoln Presidential Museum this weekend in hopes of finding this treasure. It was a success! We took lots of pictures of chomper Lincoln at many of the downtown historic sites and set up this group on Flickr. If you have pictures of The Great Masticator, please post them here! http://www.flickr.com/groups/998492@N20/
February 12th, 2009 at 6:12 am
I purchased one from the National Park Museum gift shop at Gettysburg in November, pretty much for the same reasons as listed in the article. It’s great. On today, the 200th anniversdary of Lincoln’s birth, I am going to antagonize my co-workers with it. Abe would be pleased to be remembered this way. Ok, maybe not.