THIS WEEKEND
This is the only three-day weekend in the month of February.
January had one as well.
After Christmas, however, those are the only two we get until Memorial Day.
Believers, and any non (or other) believers fine with free-riding, try to save us from this work-a-holic paucity of time off with Easter and Passover.
The latter starts on April 22 this year and is an eight-day affair. If you are following the rules, work is strictly forbidden on four of them. The former, which occurs on March 31 this year, really begins on Holy Thursday and celebrates Christendom's singular mystery of tragedy and triumph from then until Easter Sunday.
None of this, however, is mandated.
Nor, given the First Amendment, could it be.
Which gets us back to . . .
This weekend.
In January, we took off to celebrate the unique courage and extraordinary work of Martin Luther King, Jr. On Memorial Day, we will honor the sacrifice of those who gave the most. In a way, both of these secular events are sacred.
This weekend we celebrate Presidents Day.
Whether it is sacred . . .
Depends.
As regular readers of this space know, the country as a whole has not been able to agree on precisely who or what is being honored. See "Celebrating . . . Somebody", 2/21/22. Some states use the day to honor George Washington alone. Others use it to honor Washington and Abraham Lincoln. Still others honor any who have held the office.
Some celebrate on a different day in the year.
Delaware doesn't celebrate at all.
In the presidential pantheon, of course, Washington and Lincoln are gods.
The first saved us from monarchy, the second from slavery.
At the time they became president, neither result was assured.
Washington could have served for life. He went home after eight years. To the aristocrats who would have addressed him as "His Highness" or "His Excellency", he insisted on the simple "Mr. President". His humility was his superpower. When, in 1783, George III was told Washington was going to resign his military commission, the King said "If he does that, he will be the greatest man in the world."
He did.
And in so doing entered august precincts so many others -- Caesar, Napoleon, Lenin -- claim but never inhabit.
Byron put it best.
In his Ode to Napoleon.
And don the purple vest
When gazing on the Great;
To make men blush there was but one.
For his part, Lincoln inherited a fractured country on the verge of Civil War. Once that war broke out, he honored his oath by fighting it and then carefully re-laid America's Jeffersonian foundation.
This time, however, equality was made real.
On January 1, 1863, he ended slavery where he could as commander in chief, and in January 1865 he shepherded through Congress the 13th Amendment that would ultimately end slavery in its entirety. On February 1, he sent the Amendment to the states for ratification. Nineteen states had done so by April 14, the day he was shot. The rest did so by December 6.
If Washington's superpower was humility, Lincoln's was eloquence.
Among presidents, he is our Shakespeare.
In 1861, he pleaded with his countrymen, begging them to slow down and take a breath.
"You have no oath registered in heaven to destroy the Government," he said "while I shall have the most solemn one to 'preserve, protect and defend it' "
He also asked them to remember:
"We are not enemies, but friends."
"Though passion may have strained," he continued, "it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature."
Three years later at Gettysburg, he authored America's second founding.
"Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal."
"Now we are engaged," he continued, "in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure."
He believed it could.
He believed it could because on Gettysburg's "great battlefield" lay thousands who had given "their lives that that nation might live."
He told us the world would "never forget" what those soldiers "did" there.
About that, he was right.
He also told us, however, that the world "would little note, nor long remember, what we say here."
And about that, he was dead wrong.
He was wrong because, as he put it, those "honored dead" were exacting a promise from the living.
The promise was that . . .
From them, "we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion.
That . . .
"This nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom".
And that . . .
"Government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."
The first speaker that day was not Abraham Lincoln.
It was Edward Everett.
He was a former Senator, Congressman, Governor of Massachusetts and Secretary of State, the current president of Harvard University and a famed orator.
He spoke for two hours, followed by the President.
He later wrote the President, measuring their words.
"I should be glad," he said, "if I could flatter myself that I came as near to the central idea of the occasion, in two hours, as you did in two minutes."
Last week, in explaining his departure from the position embraced by his fellow GOP Senators opposing aid to Ukraine, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said that "History settles every account."
He was right.
As I write, Russia's Vladimir Putin is basking in support bordering on treason from Donald Trump and his MAGA followers in both the House and Senate.
The majority of GOP Senators voted against an emergency funding package for Ukraine. Even though the Senate bill passed with votes from the entire Democratic caucus and twenty-three Republicans, and even though the assistance is needed to stop renewed Russian counter-offensives, the Republican Speaker of the House refused to take up the Senate bill and instead sent his body home for a ten day recess.
Last weekend, Trump himself told Russia that as president he would not honor our obligation to defend NATO allies if they were attacked.
Last Wednesday, he reiterated those comments.
And yesterday we learned that Russian dissident Alexei Navalny died in the Arctic prison where he was serving a nineteen-year sentence for opposing Putin. Navalny, who Putin tried to poison in 2020, ostensibly dropped dead while "walking". The authorities have yet to release his body.
Trump's love affair with Putin is long-standing.
They are both crypto-fascists.
The only real difference between them is that, while Putin operates in a state whose institutions create no check at all on his power, corruption or ability to rub out opponents, Trump operates in one where he is currently subject to criminal indictment on ninety-one counts in four courts and has been ordered to pay $350 million and $83 million for financial fraud and sexual assault, respectively.
There is nothing to celebrate in Donald Trump or the MAGA GOP.
They are killing democracy at home and abroad.
Washington would not be a king.
Lincoln appealed to our "better angels" and created a "new birth of freedom".
Trump wants to be a king.
And the only angel he respects is . . .
The fallen one.
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