Inauguration Day Challenge!

My challenge to you, good people, is this:

If you cannot swear the Oath of Office on a Bible, what book would you choose?

For me, it depends on whether I am trying to send a message with my choice or whether I will choose a book that means a lot personally to me either with regards to our nation or to my own self.

As far as sending a message goes, not swearing on the Bible already makes a pretty clear statement that God is not necessarily going to be sitting on the cabinet next to the Treasury Secretary.  But if I really wanted to send that message home I would probably swear the oath on a copy of David Hume's A Treatise of Human Nature, which I have read bits and pieces of and manages to give a decent proof against the existence of God.  If memory serves David Hume thought we should not concern ourselves with God but rather use reason to create conditions that would lift up all mankind to new heights: a view that Jefferson, perhaps, would not disagree with.  If memory also serves, David Hume could outconsume Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.

If on the other hand I wanted to send a more personal message to the members of the opposing party, I could think of no better choice than John Kennedy Toole's Confederacy of Dunces.

If I was going to choose a book that means a lot to me personally, my mind naturally looks at the favorites I have come across over the years.  But I don't think that War and Peace has too much to say about the American Experience; I think the plot of The Crimson Petal and the White, in which the heir to a perfume empire gets stuck into his job so that he can purchase his favorite whore and support her in style, is probably a wee bit to distatesful to a broad swath of the American public; The Beatles Anthology is probably too heavy for most members of the supreme court to lug around.

My favorite book of all time, to which I attach intense personal meaning, is The Brother's Karamazov, but that book betrays a troubled soul and I feel it is important to project strength when one takes the oath of office (again, that whole messaging thing).  So, at long last, I choose Frank Beamer's Turn Up The Wick.

Not only does one get to learn about the life one of the greatest college football coaches of all time, but also how Frank turned the team around after the disasterous 2-8-1 season of 1992.  One year later the Hokies were 9-3 and found glory at the Poulan Weedeater Independence Bowl.  It is difficult to find in human history a more miraculous series of events.  Dunkirk comes to mind.

I keep it next to my bed, above my own Bible and next to a loaded Long Land Pattern flintlock musket, bayonet (naturally) attached.  Look, if it was good enough when Mel Gibson defeated the British at Cowhouse (an amalgamation of Cowpens and Guillford's Courthouse, which is what the last battle in "The Patriot" sort of seems to be) well, it's damn well good enough for me. Aim small, miss small.

So there you go.  In Turn Up the Wick I have found a book with intense personal meaning but that sends a clear message; and that message is that if we change out our staff America will finally get into a bowl game and beat Indiana.  It's a message the people are desperately waiting to hear, and it couldn't have come at a better time.  Indiana, after all, has it coming to them.

So I ask you, what book would you choose?