President's Day

President's day. Sometimes I call it "John Quincy Adams day" or "James A. Polk day" or "James A. Garfield day" or once and awhile "Calvin Coolidge day". After all isn't "president's day" a bit banal? But that's just me. I understand the calendar maker's motive. Yes, we must be inclusively bland and after all Washington (I believe it was his birthday, if I'm not mistaken) was one of those colonizers and he even mentioned God and prayed in public even though the Jeffersonian fingerprints of separation of church and state is all over the Constitution. Moreover, the same historical scholars say that all that talk of George's honesty and bravery was just a matter of fanciful legend. Of course we should know today with all the most recent research coming from the pens of the infallible Critical Theorists. All a moot point now that Washington is off the calendar. "Good riddance!" we are learning to say. "We don't have to endure your proven hypocrisies!" And furthermore: "Lucky there wasn't a charge of harassment against you, Mr. Washington! Perhaps Martha was even a child bride!" (Why if only there were a 'me too' movement then!) Perhaps we'll never know. Or perhaps some concubines will come forward even now. If so I'm sure the media will consider their claims with all respect and bring them to the attention of us all. Certainly it will be cold water on any patriotic flames one might have for the Father of our Country. Anyhow it's now common knowledge that the historians of the past, being the victors, wrote a very lopsided history easily discounted. But the new historians we can trust. They came to realize that all those White Anglo Saxon Protestants (WASPS are what they are affectionately called in places of higher learning) were the colonial supremacists that have made this country so unlivable along with such ruthless imperialists as Christopher Columbus and Amerigo Vaspuci. Nonetheless, we must be sensitive (I'm continually being told). With sensitivity being my new compass, I wish to encourage the calendar makers to even perhaps be more egalitarian and call it, "Government Workers Day"? But wait. That's still a bit exclusive, isn't it? Perhaps just "workers day"? Oh, yeah, the communists already did that. Suppose we just completely eliminate any headship or hero or supremacy of any kind and say...."Human Day"? Inoccuous enough isn't it?---inclusivity being what we are striving for. But maybe we can do better. With the unforgivable slight to other living creatures in mind, we can go further and call it "Organism Day". Oh, wait a minute, yes, I see my deeply ingrained cultural insensitivity. We are, after all, leaving out the inorganic matter. In that case, shall we, on this special day, celebrate the completely inclusive and non-heroic non supremacist: "Material day"...no, even that can be improved upon in that we are callously leaving out non-matter. That will come back to haunt us. I can see some college professor sending his students out on their weekly protest to raise his placard and banner for bitter discrimination against the non-matter particles of the universe being left out, we the sad material supremacists. Thus, "Matter and non-Matter Day". Now that would indeed be perfectly non discriminatory and grandiosely generic! A sincerely sterilized day without any hierarchical and heroic patriarchs to make us feel, in any way, inferior. That indeed an egalitarian calendar we could be comfortable to hang on our walls.