GEORGE WASHINGTON's birthday used to be celebrated on Feb. 22. Now it's on the third Monday in February, which never falls on the 22nd.
Moving the great man's birthday was demeaning enough. But some states have diminished him even more. They celebrate "Washington-Lincoln Day." (Abe was born on the 12th.) Some states go even further. They celebrate Presidents Day. All presidents are honored on the third Monday in February.
That means that if you observed last Monday as a day of national, patriotic holiness, you were celebrating the political careers of Richard Nixon, Warren G. Harding, Ulysses S. Grant, Andrew Johnson, Millard Fillmore, Tippecanoe and Tyler Too and Jeff Davis. Who needs that?
I don't, so instead of observing on Monday I observed yesterday, the real Washington's Birthday. (Though he was born on Feb. 11, the Old Style calendar being in effect in 1732 when he arrived in the world.)
Washington is our greatest president, yet one of our least known. All most people know about him isn't true. For example, he didn't wear wooden false teeth.
(What he wore were big hippopotamus ivory teeth, hinged in the rear. That is why his mouth and jaw look sort of weird to us today. In fact, he didn't look that bad. Portraitist Gilbert Stuart exaggerated the deformity. Why? Because he was a prima donna, and Washington made him angry during a sitting, Washington's best biographer, James T. Flexner, wrote, adding, "No other man's rage did Washington's historical image more harm.")
I've been re-reading Flexner since I saw in the papers that Speaker Professor Newt Gingrich had made Flexner's "Washington The Indispensable Man" required reading for Republican members of the House of Representative.
(Better read it, Bob Ehrlich. There may be a pop quiz.)
Flexner wrote it in 1974. He figured nobody but history Ph.Ds would read his four-volume biography of Washington, written in the late 1960s and early 1970s. So he did a one-volume one.
It is an excellent book, which not only makes the point forcefully that Washington was indispensable for the formation of an enduring democratic republic, but also that he is not the superhuman, Freudian father figure some portray.
"I found a fallible human being made of flesh and blood and spirit," Flexner wrote, "not a statue of marble and wood." Flexner talks about Washington's sex life, melancholy, business acumen, frugality, patriotism, religion, card-playing, drinking, dancing, gambling.
Flexner also makes the interesting point that Washington's reputation goes up and down because he is a perfect personification of the nation. So when Americans "are happy with their country," they like George, and "at times of resentment and self-distrust" they become "hostile." Except for Newtites, America seems to be ignoring George right now. What do you think that means?