Ape linkin'

I mentioned in my post "Year of the Ox" that this Chinese New Year -- 2/12 -- is "the 212th birthday of both Abe Lincoln and ape-linkin' Charles Darwin." A bit more on that pun/coincidence.

The connection between Lincoln and Linkin' is well established. The rock band Linkin Park, for example, is named after a Lincoln Park in Santa Monica, California; they changed the spelling because the domain name lincolnpark.com was already taken.

The name Abraham means "father of multitudes"; the first element, whence the short form Abe, means "father." It is this element that corresponds to ape in the pun, and Darwin's ape-linkin' took the specific form of claiming that apes were our fathers. Abraham is metaphorically seen as the father of everyone ("Father Abraham had many sons / Many sons had Father Abraham / And I am one of them / And so are you . . ."); after Darwin, the apes have taken over this role.

Abraham Lincoln was famously ugly, like an ape. (When a political opponent called him "two-faced," he quipped, "If I had another face, do you think I'd wear this one?") He was the first American president to wear a beard -- and specifically the mustache-less "Shenandoah" style, similar to the facial hair of a gorilla or chimpanzee. (The mustache is one of the things that distinguishes us from the apes.)

The final scene in the 1963 French novel La Planète des Singes prominently features the Eiffel Tower, but when the story was adapted for Hollywood, this was replaced with a similarly iconic American landmark. The 1968 Planet of the Apes with Charlton Heston went with that old Hollywood standby, the ruins of the Statue of Liberty. ("Why does Hollywood hate that statue so much?" one of my students once asked me.) The 2001 remake with Mark Wahlberg, on the other hand, takes advantage of Lincoln's ape-like features and ends with a Lincoln Memorial that memorializes not Lincoln but the ape character General Thade.

(By the way, trying to find a picture of that scene led me to an Euler diagram showing the relationship between "things that appear to be the Lincoln Memorial" and "things that are the Lincoln Memorial." The Internet is a very strange place.)

Update: Just minutes after posting this, I check Vox Popoli and find a comment saying the Super Bowl halftime show “looked like a scene from Planet of the Apes.”