Do I hear a collective sigh of relief now that Valentine’s Day is over? It’s one of those occasions in the year when so many things can go wrong. Cards with red hearts may arrive in the wrong mailbox, plush bears may end up in the wrong bedrooms, flowers may be delivered to the wrong address, and the candlelit dinner may be inedible. Then the whole uneasy balance between romance and commercialism collapses into tragedy or farce. Other annual festivals are stressful too: Thanksgiving, The Holidays, and even New Year. On St Patrick’s Day we must pretend be Irish, on April Fool’s Day we have to invent silly pranks, and on Halloween we go all the way back to the Dark Ages. There are also personal days when some extra effort is demanded: the first day of school or vacation, a new job, or an anniversary. On those mornings we wake up knowing that the usual routine will not be good enough, and that we must make a special effort.
You may think that nothing can possibly disturb the tranquility of February 15. But it is Presidents Day. This sudden, bewildering switch of attention, from hearts and flowers one day to history and power politics the next, is more than most of us can manage. Today we are requested and required to celebrate the lives of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln neither of whose birth dates actually falls on the 15th. Washington and Lincoln were men of heroic stature, who had the courage to take on the on the impossible job of President. George Washington himself had doubts. When he was first elected in 1789, he was overwhelmed, comparing his feelings to those of “A culprit going to his place of execution.” But that’s all history now, and history is harmless. We can contemplate the great Presidents of the past with detached admiration. But the trouble with history is that it has a sneaky way of leading us to make comparisons with the present and, if we are not very careful, to think about the future.
Since the days of Washington and Lincoln Presidential candidates have been more confident about their governing abilities: indeed they seem to get more confident all the time. Yet consider that there were fewer than four million Americans in this vast continent in 1789, and now there are more than three hundred millions. A nation so big and complicated seems beyond the possibility of government. If you have ever tried to organize anything you know that, as a rule of thumb, once more than six people are involved things get difficult very quickly. Arguments break out, factions form, and before you know it the whole enterprise falls apart. The surviving candidates in the primaries so far seem to have no doubts about their ability to manage hundreds of millions of independent-minded citizens in a chaotic world. You have to admire their self-confidence.
Common sense tells us that nobody can possibly be President of the United States. Yet Washington and Lincoln managed it, and so have forty-three other ordinary human mortals, some of them very ordinary indeed. How did they do it? They didn’t of course. The grand illusion of power, which hasn’t changed since the days of the Roman Empire, is just that, an illusion. It works as long as enough people believe in it, and no naughty small boys point out the Emperor’s sartorial inadequacies. A sad disillusion awaits the successful candidate who expects to make history and instead finds him or herself in the iron grip of history. On President’s Day, a little modesty would not go amiss.
Copyright: David Bouchier.
