Good Presidents?
What exactly are we celebrating tomorrow?
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We spend a great deal of time and energy in the United States talking about our presidents and ingraining details about their lives into our children’s minds. When I was a student, it was quite common to have portraits of the U.S. presidents lining the walls of a classroom right alongside the cursive alphabet. I remember spending hours staring at the faces of these dead white men (I was a student pre-Obama) and trying to imagine their stories.
We memorialize their writings in presidential libraries which become tourist attractions. There’s an attraction at Walt Disney World that involves watching animatronic replicas of each president wave as their name is called, while one or two give short speeches. Tomorrow is a federal holiday dedicated simply to “presidents.”
As I mentioned on Wednesday, we’re in the process of a move, which means we’ve been cleaning and packing a great deal. While doing that, my kids came across a children’s book we had about the U.S. presidents and a pack of flash cards which also featured our country’s leaders. As I recall, the book was from the Target dollar section many years ago (Obama is the last president featured), though I don’t remember how the cards came into our life.
The book and cards that my kids found have sparked some interesting questions and debates in our household and oddly enough, has me rethinking the role of presidents in my own life and our country.
For example, the book notes that four U.S. presidents have been Nobel Prize recipients. Theodore Roosevelt was the first one to win this honor. He may be most remembered today for outdoorsmanship and establishing the National Parks, but I’ve recently learned that he was quite the imperialist in his day. Before becoming president, he led the Navy against the Spanish and aggressively pursued taking Spanish lands after the war including the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Guam (again, great learnings from Daniel Immerwahr’s amazing book How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States).
Woodrow Wilson also won the Nobel Prize because he helped establish the League of Nations. But, as I’ve written about before, he was also SUPER racist in his domestic policies.
Jimmy Carter also received a Nobel Prize and Barack Obama was awarded one during his first months in office, at a time when his biggest accomplishment was a partial term as a U.S. senator.
Other discussions with my children have revolved around wars led, terrible ethical lapses, or both. Nixon may have established the EPA, but he also led the U.S. through the Vietnam era and was indeed “a crook.” Clinton led a period of domestic economic prosperity (at least for some people), but he also attacked countries around the world with our military and had his own personal foibles.
Ultimately, each and every president should not be seen as a hero or an icon- they are simply a man (and hopefully someday a woman) doing a job. It’s a bit strange to think of just how much importance we place on this one particular office holder, especially since the office of the presidency was meant to be a reaction to the totalitarian power of a king. We don’t have royalty on our money, but we do have former presidents.
It’s funny to think of how we lionize the leader of our country, yet we rarely pay attention to who is in the top job at other places.
We may know a handful of CEOs by name: Tim Cook, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg. But who's running General Motors or General Electric right now? Who’s the head of Boeing? TikTok? Target?
As anybody who’s ever worked a corporate job can probably tell you, who’s helming the ship is often much less relevant than who’s actually shoveling coal into the boilers to help propel the ship (metaphorically speaking).
In my time at This Old House Productions, there were probably a dozen different people who were in charge under some version of the title President or CEO, sometimes under the corporate ownership of Time Inc and later, when This Old House was spun off as an independent business. I don't remember most of their names, and most of them didn’t last long enough to make lasting impacts to how our TV shows were actually shot, edited, and released. The biggest changes to how our programming appeared on your screen were brought about by the producers, editors, on camera talent, and others closest to the work.
As we come into an election year where I am not crazy about the choices (a narcissistic psychopath versus a genocidal geriatric) and as the media continues its breathless coverage of the primary process as through the latest barb delivered by Nikki Haley and the response from Donald Trump is really the most important thing we should all be caring about.
I happened to stumble upon some biographical information about James Garfield in writing about him a few weeks ago. He was not even running for president and was somehow drafted during the nominating convention because the delegates couldn’t decide on a clear winner for the Republican nominee.
I miss the notion of that. There’s a messiness to it that democracy is supposed to have but which does not conform to our current system. A leader who’s seemingly there not to change the world, but simply to keep their hands on the wheel and make sure the country progresses in a relatively linear path.
In the end, we expend a ton of time, money, and energy thinking about, discussing, and debating the role of our presidents. No matter how inspiring the rhetoric of the campaign cycle, real and lasting change is minor at best. It’s often blamed on an uncooperative congress, the Supreme Court, or some other check and balance on absolute power, but presidents almost never live up to their campaign promises.
Maybe it’s time we get back to the notion of the president as a regular person doing their best to serve our country rather than a rock star celebrity. Wouldn’t it be nice to barely even know who’s in charge and not have to worry about who they will be bombing next?
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