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 monarchical
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 for 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 denizens 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 losing 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.
A
popular pass time for the holiday are the annual articles listing the best and
worse presidents. By almost universal consensus
the two original February honorees are listed one and two, occasionally swapping
spots followed by Franklin D. Roosevelt,
his distant cousin Theodore and
either Thomas Jefferson or James Knox Polk (for Manifest Destiny fans.)
The
classic roster of worsts includes of such luminaries as Franklin Pierce,
John Tyler, Millard Fillmore, James Buchanan, Ulysses S. Grant, and Warren
G. Harding.
All
of which begs the question of how more recent Presidents fare. Lately historians are rating Dwight D. Eisenhower as a comer, even
breaching the top five on a few lists.
During
his occupancy of the office I boldly suggested that George W. Bush may have done the impossible and reached the pinnacle
of presidential awfulness. He left office
with few fans even in his own party, who were beginning to hate him not for his
unnecessary wars but for being the champion spendthrift of all time. Even his staunchest supporters have pretty
much given up the campaign to paint the Shrub
as a misunderstood Lincolnesque figure, boldly pursuing a noble cause when
the ignoble people doubted. It was simply too ludicrous to be maintained.
Does
my harsh judgment hold up? Most of the
bottom dwellers on the list got there not for doing bad, but for being
lazy, incompetent, drunk or for 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 was far more damaging and longer
lasting. He 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 preemptive war that has left the nation
nearly friendless in the world, embraced 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, attacked
the “bright line” separating Church and State, ignored science
whenever it drew conclusions that threatened his ideological preconceptions,
and ignored Global Warming as a tipping point crisis nears. And he
exited shoveling money at bankers who caused the greatest economic disaster
since the Great Depression—and managed
to make people think that that was his successor’s idea. That’s a pretty
impressive list. It surely means that he
must at least have a spot alongside the “Northern men of Southern Principles—Pierce
and Buchanan—whose malfeasance set the stage for the Civil War.
And
what of the current occupant? It is, of
course, too early for the ultimate judgment of history. Barak
Obama certainly came into office at a time of crisis—a boost to any chances
to make one’s mark. Brilliant men and
able men have served and been forgotten simply because of the relative
tranquility of their terms. Faced with
almost unprecedented economic disaster and two unpopular wars almost impossible
to easily and safely withdraw from, Obama soldiered on with dignity and
surprising success given the implacable opposition of an ideologically driven
opposition in control of Congress. He even managed to secure the passage of the
first major health care reforms
since Medicare, however half-hearted
and flawed they may be. And after
stunning the world by winning re-election by a solid popular and Electoral
College majorities has staked out a bold progressive agenda for his second term.
But
there is a major fly in the ointment—the fatal flaw that overwhelms real achievement
and merit. Lyndon B. Johnson advanced of civil
rights and social reforms continuing a New
Deal legacy but was bogged down in another senseless and unpopular war. Richard
Nixon had foreign policy triumphs like opening relations with China and presided over the
establishment of the Environmental
Protection Agency and the Occupational
Safety and Health Administration but was undone by his own paranoid
criminality. Woodrow Wilson’s international idealism and reluctant support of women’s suffrage was matched by unprecedented
domestic repression of labor and socialists and by the introduction of Jim Crow segregation into the Federal Government.
Desperate
for a way to extricate ground troops from Iraq
and Iran and to counter the
lingering threats of an already largely smashed and dismantled terrorist enemy, Obama embraced the
star chamber secrecy and brutality of a secret war established by the Bush
administration and which he had once
railed against. And he came to rely on
war-at-a-safe distance drone technology
and a policy of targeted assassinations.
Not only have the targets included American citizens, more importantly
they have also been blunt instruments with plenty of civilian deaths in collateral damage and by simple
mistake. Every Pakistani village hit earns generations of implacable new enemies
sworn to revenge. Far from restoring, as
the world hoped after his first election, American prestige and respect, these
policies have further isolated this country and made us the most despised
nation in the world. Further policies of
domestic surveillance and
coordination of attacks on the Occupy
Movement and other social protests threaten
freedom of speech and protest in this country.
If
the President ever hopes to be enshrined as an extra head on Mount Rushmore he needs to reverse
course on those policies which will surely poison his reputation.
At
any rate, happy Presidents Day to one and all.
Go and buy a mattress. Millard Fillmore will thank you.
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