I am Jack's Revisionist History

Don’t mess with Taylor Durden, no matter how silly his knickers look.

202 years ago to his day, the most important story ever to take place in Weehauken, New Jersey occurred. (No, not the federal granting of first NYC-NJ ferry service - that was 1752. And completely uninteresting. Hold on, I’m getting sleepy just think-)

(shakes head vigorously) Not only was July 11, 1804 the most important Weehauken historical event, it was also damn exciting. After all, it’s not exactly every day when the Vice President of the United States shoots a guy. (go ahead, insert your own Cheney joke here. We’ll wait.)

The Alexander Hamilton-Aaron Burr duel set the tone for political combat that would totally justify the Charles Sumner caning of 1852 and the 1996 squishing of Byron Dorgan, the junior senator from South Dakota who accidentally sat in Ted Kennedy’s chair. But aside from cross-congressional in-fighting, the Hamilton v. Burr duel set the tone for a much more important societal institution.

Fight Club.

Expertly documented in the 1999 non-fiction feature of the same name by David Fincher, the underground society of the everyday man releasing aggression via “clocking thy brother,” Fight Club has become a cult-favorite and one of my favorite movies of all-time. Edward Norton, after watching his life self-destruct, meets another wayward soul in Brad Pitt’s Tyler Durden. At the end of a night discussing collective American commercial policies, the meeting ends…in a duel.

”I want you to shoot me as hard as you can.”

Yes, this is the cinematic recording of the founding of Fight Club. However, YAB’s crack research team has revealed that the Weehauken duel of 1804 between two staunch political patriots serves as the actual introduction of such a society. We admit that the Fincher version remains more popular for two reasons.

First, video cameras were not around in 1804, preventing anyone from immortalizing the actual account between Burr’s pistol and A-Ham’s stomach. And since the Big Apple lay just across the river via a ferry ride, no one got so bored that they decided to etch the scene into granite or a metal plate or a-Sketch. And second, the first rule of Fight Club, even in 1804, was you DO NOT TALK ABOUT FIGHT CLUB.

Brad Pitt’s Tyler Durden? Try Aaron Burr’s Tyler Durden.

Yes, Burr was everything that Hamilton wanted to be. He was American-born (Hamilton was raised St. Nevis), held federal office (VP), was earlier in the alphabet, and was even the answer to a hard-to-say trivia question centuries later. Face it, Alexander Hamilton was, as they say in 1804, a big honkin’ dufus. Burr spent his time debating much cooler cats, like George Clinton.

For Hamilton, the idea was simple. It was time to run with the hip-kids, and Burr was his meal ticket. Why not start an underground society that would advocate brotherhood, freedom, and haymakers? There was just one problem. He died in the first fight.

The First Amendment of Fight Club was ratified in 1805: There are no guns in Fight Club.