“…The American people are sick and tired of Washington politics!…” This is not me speaking. This is a generic self-introduction of any aspiring American politician running for a place under the sun in... Washington! Sadly, naming the American capital after George Washington and making it a synonym of the Federal Government has given a good name a bad rap.
Not that George Washington was some latter-day saint, but he was overall an admirable and honorable man in life, and as a beloved national symbol, he represents the best of what America stands for... That he is also associated with the worst, courtesy of his namesake, the capital city, is a huge and rather sad irony.
Generally speaking, my personal admiration for George Washington is one of the many components of my natural and objectively deserved admiration for the America of the American ideal. Today’s disillusionment is not with the ideal itself, but with its practice. It comes on the heels of America’s most recent “heroes” and the ideology of the so-called "Project for the New American Century," which has by no means retreated since the presumable changing of the guard in Washington, as both the Republicans and the Democrats are infected with it. This ideology represents an appalling perversion of the American ideal, of the values and traditions, consistent with this great nation’s past, of which the First President is a shining and endearing incarnation.
The most profound wisdom concerning mankind is perhaps encapsulated in the closing line of the American movie classic Some Like It Hot: “Well, nobody’s perfect!” (Osgood Fielding III.)
Had the big truth of this wisdom been accepted indiscriminately, there would have been no heroes. As soon as the critical historian starts putting the greatness of each great personality of the past and the present under his powerful microscope, every biography, whether cut in marble or granite, should immediately start giving cracks, and crumble. But, fortunately for the morale of posterity, and for the whole genre of monumental history, the truth about our heroes lies not in their living biographies, faithfully rendered, but in the way that they have been etched in the collective memory of humanity. Unlike anybody mortal, the immortal legend can, and even must be perfect!
"I can’t tell a lie," says the legend of George Washington, and this story must be true--- not because it actually happened some time in Washington’s real life, but because Washington is an American national symbol, and so, also, is the legendary cherry tree. Deconstruct the man, and you deconstruct the whole nation: such is the challenge to all honest historians, and unless the connection between the hero and his nation is understood in these terms, the nation is endangered by a chronic skepticitis, and an inevitable degeneration will follow.
George Washington’s legend, however, does not require any particular embellishment. Both as a general in charge of the Revolutionary forces, and as the first President of the United States, who had a real chance to keep himself in power for more than his eight years, but passed on it, he deserves genuine admiration, and such facts of his life are naturally fit to become the stuff of his legends, while just as in the case of Benjamin Franklin, which we discussed before, everything about a great man’s life that cannot be readily harmonized with his legend, becomes rather inconsequential.
George Washington’s honorable place in history is forever assured, and it is therefore not all an illusion of wishful thinking that my positive picture of the United States was formed on a solid basis, to which he is a great contributor. The problem with modern America is that history herself has been insolently repudiated and relegated, against the backdrop of political correctness of this day and age.
Not that George Washington was some latter-day saint, but he was overall an admirable and honorable man in life, and as a beloved national symbol, he represents the best of what America stands for... That he is also associated with the worst, courtesy of his namesake, the capital city, is a huge and rather sad irony.
Generally speaking, my personal admiration for George Washington is one of the many components of my natural and objectively deserved admiration for the America of the American ideal. Today’s disillusionment is not with the ideal itself, but with its practice. It comes on the heels of America’s most recent “heroes” and the ideology of the so-called "Project for the New American Century," which has by no means retreated since the presumable changing of the guard in Washington, as both the Republicans and the Democrats are infected with it. This ideology represents an appalling perversion of the American ideal, of the values and traditions, consistent with this great nation’s past, of which the First President is a shining and endearing incarnation.
The most profound wisdom concerning mankind is perhaps encapsulated in the closing line of the American movie classic Some Like It Hot: “Well, nobody’s perfect!” (Osgood Fielding III.)
Had the big truth of this wisdom been accepted indiscriminately, there would have been no heroes. As soon as the critical historian starts putting the greatness of each great personality of the past and the present under his powerful microscope, every biography, whether cut in marble or granite, should immediately start giving cracks, and crumble. But, fortunately for the morale of posterity, and for the whole genre of monumental history, the truth about our heroes lies not in their living biographies, faithfully rendered, but in the way that they have been etched in the collective memory of humanity. Unlike anybody mortal, the immortal legend can, and even must be perfect!
"I can’t tell a lie," says the legend of George Washington, and this story must be true--- not because it actually happened some time in Washington’s real life, but because Washington is an American national symbol, and so, also, is the legendary cherry tree. Deconstruct the man, and you deconstruct the whole nation: such is the challenge to all honest historians, and unless the connection between the hero and his nation is understood in these terms, the nation is endangered by a chronic skepticitis, and an inevitable degeneration will follow.
George Washington’s legend, however, does not require any particular embellishment. Both as a general in charge of the Revolutionary forces, and as the first President of the United States, who had a real chance to keep himself in power for more than his eight years, but passed on it, he deserves genuine admiration, and such facts of his life are naturally fit to become the stuff of his legends, while just as in the case of Benjamin Franklin, which we discussed before, everything about a great man’s life that cannot be readily harmonized with his legend, becomes rather inconsequential.
George Washington’s honorable place in history is forever assured, and it is therefore not all an illusion of wishful thinking that my positive picture of the United States was formed on a solid basis, to which he is a great contributor. The problem with modern America is that history herself has been insolently repudiated and relegated, against the backdrop of political correctness of this day and age.
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