IT'S PRESIDENTS DAY
One of these things is not like the others. Can you guess which one, boys and girls?
It is Presidents Day. Bear with me, dear reader, and try to sustain the warm glow of that holiday as you peruse my rambling thoughts.
To begin with, it’s a bastard holiday, born of merchant greed on one hand and the despair of parents stuck with small children at home twice in February.
The old Federalists made sure that the nation celebrated Washington’s Birthday. It was to be a patriotic celebration emphasizing dignity, decorum and authority. In short, it was to celebrate a Founder demigod, an old revolutionary stripped of rabble and insurrection. The old Republicans-the Jeffersonians-not be confused with the current squatters on than honorable appellation-despised the celebration as monarchal and preferred to swarm the streets carrying Liberty Caps on poles-French style-on other occasions.
But Washington deserved the honor. He invented being President. He served honestly and honorably, and if he preferred the council of his Secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton to that of his fellow Virginian Thomas Jefferson, at least he resisted all of the former’s blandishments toward aristocracy and his desire to advance himself as Grand Vizier to the President’s Caliph. Most importantly Washington earned every accolade he has received by the simple act of voluntarily leaving the job and allowing his successor to peacefully follow him into office. This precedent setting feat has seldom been matched in post-revolutionary nations. That Americans take it for granted is astonishing.
Meanwhile, most Northern states added Lincoln’s Birthday to their calendars following the Civil War.. It began amid the hagiography of the fallen leader and his elevation to martyr status and continued as a way for the Grand Army of the Republic and the new Republican Party to Wave the Bloody Shirt at home while sticking their collective thumbs in the eye of their vanquished foes. Across the old Confederacy Lincoln was reviled as a murderous tyrant. They preferred to celebrate Jefferson Davis, or better yet the unblemished knight of the Lost Cause, Robert E. Lee.
When Harry S. Truman finally proclaimed Lincoln’s Birthday a Federal holiday, his very Confederate mother, residing with him and Bess at the White House, cursed her son and never forgave him.
So the nation ended up with two holidays in inconvenient February. If only they had managed to get born at a decently separated interval of months, both might have been able to retain their own holiday.
But, alas, they did not. And the days often fell either inconveniently mid-week or on a weekend. The former disrupted the work week for employers. The latter cheated workers of a paid holiday. Educators hated the disruption to their pedagogy of two holidays. Parents despaired of rug rats at home. Merchants yearned for an extended week-end of sales. So Congress, in its infinite wisdom, decreed Presidents Day, conveniently set down on a Monday between the actual natal anniversaries of the original honorees. Whoopee! Three Day Weekend!
Better yet none of the rest of the denizen’s of the White House need feel slighted-this was going to be their holiday too. Like a first grade T-ball player spared the sting of loosing by playing a “fun game where no one keeps score,” Rutherford B. Hayes could rest easy in the comforting knowledge that he was the peer of the Founder and of the Emancipator. It also silenced the partisans of Franklin D. Roosevelt on one hand and Ronald Reagan on the other, who dreamed of raising their respective heroes to a loftier pantheon and a place on the national calendar.
In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson posited that “All men are created equal…” Unitarian Universalists treasure our First Principle-“Respect for the inherit worth and dignity of every person.” Neither of these are assertions of blanket uniformity of talent, capacity, or wisdom. Nor has there been equality of ability, opportunity and circumstance among the occupants of the Presidential chair. There have been great presidents and there have been failures. There have been, however, no saints and no pure knaves.
The befuddled current occupant of the White House gets to be included in the celebration as well. Not that many of us feel much like heaping honor on his head. Even his staunchest supporters have pretty much given up the campaign of a couple of years ago to paint George W. as a misunderstood Lincolnesque figure, boldly pursuing a noble cause when the ignoble people doubted. It was simply too ludicrous to be maintained.
The consensus today is the Shrub will go down in history as among the nations worst-if not the worst-presidents. That puts him in the company of such luminaries as Franklin Pierce, John Tyler, Millard Fillmore, James Buchanan, Ulysses S. Grant, and Warren G. Harding. But it may be unfair to those gentlemen to be lumped in with the current Resident. Most got on the list not for doing bad, but for being lazy, incompetent, drunk and not doing anything at all to stave off the long slide to Civil War. Grant and Harding presided over notoriously corrupt administrations, but neither did lasting harm to the nation or Democracy.
But the legacy of George W. Bush will be far more damaging and longer lasting. He has sponsored and presided over unnecessary war, prosecuted that war with stunning incompetence, nearly destroyed the ground forces of the U.S. military, proclaimed a doctrine of pre-emptive war that has left the nation nearly friendless in the world, embrace a policy of torture, systematically attacked the civil liberties of American citizens, subverted the Constitution by asserting a new doctrine of the unitary executive, turned a budget surplus into a staggering Federal Debt, pursued a policy of showering the rich with tax breaks and relief from regulation that has compounded the class divide in the nation to 19th Century levels, allowed an American city to be virtually destroyed and abandoned it citizens, has attacked the “bright line” separating Church and State, has ignored science whenever it drew conclusions that threatened his ideological preconceptions, and has ignored Global Warming as a tipping point crisis nears. That’s a pretty impressive list, and I am sure I have forgotten some equally outrageous acts of malfeasance.
So happy Presidents Day to 42 former Commanders-in-Chief.
And a Bronx Cheer and Single Digit Salute to the Pretender.