Ponderings on Presidents’ Day

Photo by Warmice01, CC BY-SA 3.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

Presidents’ Day has always been a JV holiday, if we are honest about it. Technically Washington’s Birthday is the official nomenclature, and The Uniform Monday Holiday Act made it one of the slew of “Monday” Federal holidays that created three day weekends for workers and excuses for advertisers to tout big sales named for (insert Federal holiday here). After January’s MLK Day, Presidents’ Day is the last holiday waypoint before the slog to Memorial Day at the end of May, give or take a spring break.

Presidents’ Day doesn’t even get the hand wringing “have we lost the meaning of it” type pub that a Memorial or Veterans Day holiday gets, and lacks the religious and consumer heft of Christmas. Since presidents are inherently political, the “reason for the season” would be whatever you thought of whichever president one was pondering. Hardly universal good tidings. Especially in an election year where the choice for Leader of the Free World is between old and corrupt but jovial and slightly less old and epically corrupt but a raving jackass, round two.

I truly wonder if I will ever again look at a ballot for President of the United States of America and see the name of someone worthy to hold the office. My fellow Americans seem pretty content to continue the tradition of griping about the choices with words and social media, but take no action whatsoever to prevent our quadrennial national foray into “lesser of two evils.” Which always ends up with a lesser.

Since we have a representative government, apparently We, The People, are all good with being lesser because, reasons.

Throughout the course of American history we’ve had a few great presidents, a handful of truly abhorrent ones, and most of the rest falling somewhere in between. Recency bias always clouds the rankings of presidents, and the professional historians are almost as bad at making the rankings about themselves as the professional baseball writers are at making the Baseball Hall of Fame all about themselves. Even still, most can agree the Lincolns and Washingtons are to be commended and pedestaled, while the presidents that let the Civil War fester stay at the bottom of the list with the sole redeeming quality that at least they weren’t Woodrow Wilson.

Washington especially deserves note, since this is technically his holiday, for being the closest thing America got to a Cincinnatus. Even that comp doesn’t completely work, since Washington may well have been the richest man in America in his retirement. But George did manage to do the job, be at least publicly humble about it, and when the time came did the country the ultimate service a politician and public figure can do: when it was time to go to the house he went to the house. And stayed there. And meant it.

For this we give him a giant pencil on the national mall, named a bunch of stuff after him, and give him the second of the yearly Monday holidays, which few folks relate to him unless reminded. Seems a poor return for service, but it is more than anyone else got. Even Lincoln, seated in his temple across the National Mall from George’s obelisk, has to share the unofficial “Presidents’ Day” since his birthday being in the Gregorian vicinity of Washingtons.

And thus, America lurches ever forward, with faint hope of a Washington on the horizon to lead us. “Adversity makes men, and prosperity makes monsters,” Victor Hugo allegedly observed. Washington, having set our nation on a path of prosperity after the righteous cause of the revolution, would seem an odd villain for the Year of Our Lord 2024’s electoral exercise in “not again,” but them’s the breaks.

Blame George Washington for Trump v Biden Part Deux. It is his fault. He was too good for our own good after all.

Happy Presidents’ Day.