Presidents Day

Conservative critics of the president's televised address to young scholars across the land need to take a deep breath and calm down. When one's adversaries seem to be making it a habit of doing things that make one wonder whether they are crazy or stupid, that's a good thing. The adversary I have in mind is not the president himself but the team assembled around him. Some kind of inspirational address to mark the first back-to-school of his administration might have been done in a benign enough way to make whoever criticized it seem shrill. That was my first thought, a little rhetorical jujitsu that turns an overly aggressive assailant's energy against him. Dispensing a dose of platitudes of the Just Say No variety would hardly be unprecedented, nor out of line with the way electronic interconnectedness has evolved of late. But instead of keeping it as simple as an old-fashioned spoonful of cod liver oil, somebody got the bright idea to trick the whole exercise out with lesson plans, etc. This had the effect of sending out yet another blast of confirmation that we are being governed by a gang that can't seem to shoot straight. It is hard, watching how things have played out since about the time that CrapNTrade cleared the House, not to wonder if somebody somewhere is trying to lull the opposition party into a sense of overconfidence. 

One can certainly sympathize with concerns about parental notification and "going around" school districts, but viewed in the light of prospective outcomes, this little episode is all to the good. Am I the only person who has found himself wondering if any of these bright young things who think this stuff up have ever been around any actual children? It is likely that some child somewhere will be nudged in the direction of progressive ideology, but based on the kids I have known I would expect an opposite effect. For every future ACORN "volunteer", expect the faux sincerity of this exercise to inoculate at least a dozen young citizens against the blandishments of the Nanny State. To the extent any of them are actually paying close enough attention for the message to actually sink in, I would expect it to plants seeds of dissonance. Most kids are smart enough to recognize the phoniness of telling someone you never met how much you care about them; if not now, it will sink in eventually for all but the most thickheaded of them.

The nerve that is being struck here ties in with something I have observed over the time I have been aware that there was a President. Back when JFK made his "Ask not.." appeal, we used to celebrate and learn about the lives of two remarkable individuals who happened to have been Presidents. We learned about the character, trials and triumphs of Washington and of Lincoln. That they both served as the chief executive was secondary to what they were as men. Then somewhere along the way, to neaten up the calendar one supposes, we woke up to Presidents Day. The effect, to the degree anyone thinks about this day as anything but a pretext for sales and a day off from work, was to shift the focus from a couple of individuals of exemplary character to the office itself. Washington and Lincoln were inherently worthy of respect. The fact that a person got himself elected, maybe not so much. 

Viewed in the light of how the whole experiment was cobbled together in the first place, this devolution is at least faintly distasteful. Now fifty or so years after JFK made his appeal (at a time when there was scarcely a rural county or urban neighborhood that had not recently shared in the ultimate form of sacrifice for one's country), the Keystone Cops in charge think its a good idea to ask kids to write down how they can "help Him". This is creepy, so much so that once again, they do themselves more harm than good.