According to the federal government, today is Washington’s Birthday. Forgive me for not being pleased about this. I do not think of Washington as a great man and I certainly don’t see him as the father of our country. He is the greatest symbol of the Federalist Party — an oligarchic group so repugnant to the wishes of the American people that it was effectively destroyed within a decade. Basically, he was a royalist. But we Americans love us some military heroes. We also love us some rich men. I question Washington’s position as a war hero, but there is no doubt that he was a rich man.

He was a rich man because he owned slaves — a lot of slaves. But I suppose I could live with him being simply a vile slave owner. I could even live with his hypocrisy. The man decided that slavery was wrong before the start of the Revolutionary War. But just a few years later, he was looking to sell his slaves. Not to be too explicit about it, but if you believe slavery is wrong, you don’t sell your slaves; you free them. But what really bothers me is the two centuries of apologetics for Washington’s support of slavery.

It isn’t hard to find slave owners who said privately that slavery was wrong. They all knew it was wrong. But they didn’t do anything about it. As a hugely popular president, good ol’ George kept true to the myth that he never told a lie: he never said a thing against slavery, because he didn’t care. It was all about commerce.

Clearly, we celebrate Washington’s Birthday because it is something we can all agree on. (Not me, obviously.) We can’t celebrate Lincoln’s birthday anymore, given how many Americans think he was evil for taking away the South’s God given right to enslave people and beat them almost to death. That’s almost to death, people! Remember Exodus 21:20, “If a man strikes his male or female slave with a rod and he dies at his hand, he shall be punished.” I’m sure if you ask Justice Roy Moore, he’ll tell you that the Civil War would have been acceptable if it had been regarding God’s “slave death by rod” law. Otherwise, Lincoln is controversial 150 years after his death.

But maybe it is right that that we celebrate Washington’s Birthday. I mean, we could celebrate Thomas Paine’s birthday, but that would be a sham. The ideals that Paine stood for — freedom, individual rights, human dignity — are not things that the United States stands for. Slavery, human oppression, and the rights of rich — these are what the modern United States stands for. But I think we could use a better name for the holiday. For one thing, Washington was born on 22 February 1732. So it isn’t actually his birthday. A much better name for the holiday would Oligarchs’ Day. That was what Washington stood for. I’m sure he would be in favor of it.

See Also

Washington’s Birthday
Happy Oney Judge Day!

On this day exactly 51 years ago, radio personality Glenn Beck was born. That just happens to be the exactly day that I was born. In most ways, I am not pleased about this. As I discussed yesterday, his attempt to co-opt the legacy of Thomas Paine was vile. Of course, he’s done the same thing with Martin Luther King Jr. Like a lot of modern conservatives, Beck thinks that he is the real radical. In a sense, he’s right. But the radicals of the past who he looks up to were working to help the weak. Beck is a radical in the name of helping the powerful.

I am impressed with Beck in that he is a searcher. Unfortunately, some time ago, he discovered The Truth™. And so all his searching goes into the service of discovering what he thinks is the truth. And it has sent him down the rabbit hole that is the world of conspiracy theories. The basis of everything for Beck is Cleon Skousen’s The 5,000 Year Leap.

But you have to give the man credit for combining his own bizarre collection of beliefs with a messianic sense. While my father’s girlfriend laid dying, she was glued to Beck’s television show. She had to be there every day — the same way as people in cults. She felt that Beck was transmitting secret truths to her. She died before seeing his downfall. But he’s still hugely successful on the internet. There are a lot of people like my dad’s girlfriend. They never tire of the oracle. I, of course, see him more like this:

Happy birthday Glenn Beck.

On this day in 1737, the great writer and political theorist Thomas Paine was born. He is best know for having written Common Sense, which remains the biggest selling book in American history relative to the size of the population. But it isn’t for this that we ought to remember him. The Age of Reason, his attack against organized religion, and Christianity specifically, is even more relevant today than it was then. It is especially because of his article “Agrarian Justice” that I most admire him. In it, he argues for a guaranteed income—an idea so radical that even today it is considered beyond the pale. Nonetheless, I now see it is a necessary salve to the institutional inequality of modern economies.

Another thing I like about him is that he was so good at getting into trouble. Even Common Sense had its domestic detractors. John Adams, who agreed with the conclusions of the pamphlet, said it was “without any restraint or even an attempt at any equilibrium or counter poise, that it must produce confusion and every evil work.” Rights of Man was largely an attack on Edmund Burke and the very idea of hereditary rule. It would have gotten Paine hanged had he ever returned to England. And then after narrowly escaping getting his head chopped off in France, he only made it back into America thanks to then President Jefferson. By that time, the religious people hated him for obvious reasons and now the Federalists hated him for Common Sense, even though the existence of the country was doubtful if not for how the book galvanized the people.

It bothers me that conservatives try to appropriate Paine. Glenn Beck even published his own version of Common Sense (Glenn Beck’s Common Sense), with the subtitle, “The Case Against an Out-of-Control Government, Inspired by Thomas Paine.” This is nonsense. Paine wasn’t against government; he was against government that didn’t work for the people. He would have been appalled at the conservative view of government where its only purpose is to help the rich. That wasn’t Paine.

Of course, mostly Paine is just ignored. In grammar school, I was taught about Common Sense and then Paine was never mentioned again. Now all we know are the the presidents: Washington, Adams, Jefferson. Not one of them was the man that Paine was. Two of them were major slave owners. And the other was a royalist. It’s almost as though we were an aristocracy, the way we honor only men who had such ostentation power. No person from the Revolutionary War era stands as such a great example of our country’s ideals. There ought to be a day named after him.

Happy birthday Thomas Paine!

This article is a minor revision of an article I wrote last year, The Only Founding Father Who Matters.