THE BULLSEYE ADDRESS - Speech written by Mark Benjamin.

- Speech written by Mark Benjamin.

THE BULLSEYE ADDRESS
Four score and four nights ago Minnesota’s bar owners brought forth on this state a new art form, Theater Night, conceived in creativity and dedicated to the proposition that all smokers are created free and equal.
Now we are engaged in a great legal war, testing whether that art form, or any art form, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war, Bullseye Saloon. We have come to dedicate this bar, as a freedom-loving place of patriotism for those who lit up so that others might smoke. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this bar. The brave people, smokers and non-smokers, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we say here but it can never forget that we smoked here. It is for us, the smokers, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who smoked here before have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us – that from these honored smokers we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion – that we here highly resolve that these smokers shall not have smoked in vain – that Theater Night in Minnesota shall have a new birth of freedom – and that Theater Night of the smokers, by the smokers, for the smokers shall not perish from this state.