Repeal President’s Day
Just because James Buchanan is no longer the worst President in American history is still not a reason that we have to “celebrate” him.
When I was a lad, February offered two – count ’em – free days off: Lincoln’s Birthday on the 12th and Washington’s Birthday 10 days later. That lovely scheme ended in 1971 to be replaced instead by the smoggy bureaucratic idea of lumping all 46 Chief Executives into one day of national forgetting. Presidents Day stinks and we’d be better off consigning it to a dusty room in the National Archives where even the spiders wouldn’t bother with it.
Why should we even theoretically “celebrate” all the Presidents? Clearly, Abe and George deserve a bit of love, but Richard Nixon? It was on Nixon’s watch that birthed this ghastly “holiday” as part of the mind-numbingly named Uniform Monday Holiday Act. (Oooh, the party is ON!) Even Dick knew there was no chance in hell that his birthday on January 9 was going to be considered even as an Arbor Day-level holiday. So the best he could hope for in the way of future hailing of his chiefness, was sharing attention with the likes of John Tyler, Franklin Pierce and Jimmy Carter. Given that this First Fraternity membership gives equal weight to the general who defeated the Third Reich as well as the mummy-haired phony Pharaoh of Forest Hills, it’s not fair to sully the deserving Presidents by association with the dimmer bulbs. Why should Thomas Jefferson have to share a day with Andrew Johnson? Barack Obama deserves more honor than George W. but this putative holiday lumps them all into one bunch so that we can’t tell them apart. It’s a bullshit holiday.
In the interest of Presidential equity, I say bring back the two February birthday-holidays, add January 30 to the mix – give FDR some credit already – and heave-ho Columbus Day with a long-overdue boot. After all, liking or loathing a President is the principal point of having a half-assed democracy like ours. Things haven’t been the same since all the POTUSes got balled up together into one nothingness of a federal holiday that has cost us a February day off and gave us nothing in compensation but 25% off all sectional sofas.
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