42 Biographies Later

By the Maui Curmudgeon (43rd in a 43-part series)

How do the U.S. Presidents stack up? I thought I’d find out by reading biographies of all 42 constitutionally elected presidents, in the order of their administrations.Reading books on every president from Washington to Clinton is a bit like going to the dentist. You really don’t want to, you know it’s going to hurt, but you also know you’ll be glad you did when it’s over. And I am glad. The task gave me a good historical understanding of the office and the men who have occupied it. And it gave me a bit of insight into the current candidates and there supposed qualifications.

Grave Misconceptions

First, I want to apologize to Sister Bernadette’s fourth grade history class for misleading them in my oral report on Andrew Jackson. Contrary to what I said, Jackson was not a hero or great champion of democracy. He was a racist pig whose men hated him when he was general.

Reading all these biographies gave me a good chance to correct some wrong ideas I have held (and frankly was taught in grammar school) about these fellows. To wit:

George Washington wasn’t just a good president, he was a very great man; his PR doesn’t do him justice. Of all the men involved in the American Revolution, and of the first seven who became president, only Washington was indispensible. Sadly, a majority of Americans think these founders used the constitution to establish a Christian nation. No. What the constitution did and does do is reflect the mind of one man more than any other - Washington. It was he who was president at the Constitutional Congress, and he guided it through to its conclusion. And he bettered himself - though a southerner with slaves, and not well off, he came to understand slavery was wrong and not only released all his slaves, but did so sending them into the world with new clothes, some money and recommendations for work.

Even when young, I was never snowed by Thomas Jefferson, a whiner who road the creation of one good document - the Declaration of Independence - into the White House, where he could be as hypocritical as any man ever was in the office. He was also a rapist (you don’t really think the slave Sally Hemmings had the right to refuse him, do you?) and never set free his slaves. “All men are created equal” indeed.

The great John Adams and his insanely intelligent wife Abigail put the lie to the dirty excuse “well, the founding fathers were products of their time and didn’t really know that slavery was that bad.” Bullshit, Adams might say today. He and Abigail fought against slavery all their lives.

Here’s a heresy: I’m not overimpressed with Abraham Lincoln either. Sure, it’s long been bandied about that he would have kept slavery if he could have held the union together, but it goes deeper than that. One reason the war took so long is because he didn’t recognize talent (U.S.Grant) soon enough, and he, despite being a real rookie, meddled terribly in the military conduct of the war the first two years, costing a great loss of life. Add to that his suspension of Constitutional rights, and you have a good writer and speaker, not much else, frankly.

On the other hand, I really thought Ulysses S. Grant to be a horrible man and president, and a johnny-come-lately to the Civil War. It turns out, yeah, he supported corrupt men in his administration (he refused to fire a man until proven guilty of a charge, which really dragged out the political pain), but he was a great general - some say the greatest general mankind has ever known. He never lost a battle. He had the purest of intentions while in the White House, and repeatedly sent Federal troops into the South to protect newly freed slaves. A man of his word and a staunch friend, he also wrote an American masterpiece: his autobiography, the greatest book ever written by a president.

Real putzes, who I didn’t know were, include William McKinley, a slimy imperialist, and Jimmy Carter (Sorry Jimmy, you are a great human being  - and that’s enough - but you were a bad president.)

Decent blokes I thought were way overblown or who were downright evil include Teddy Roosevelt and Grover Cleveland. My apologies guys.

The Ugly Thread in the American Tapestry

What all this history does is make a clear a devastating point about America: It was never a great country, it isn’t now and never will be. It never so much as had the potential.

This country began by eradicating the indiginous population. When it won independence from Britian, it established a country which codified the appalling concept that people who weren’t Caucasian were only three-fifths human. The country spend more than 70 years arguing that point, often with the Northeast trying to placate petulant southern politicians who, like babies always wanting another bottle, cried about leaving the union if they didn’t get their way.

Finally, the Civil War, in which the president at first wanted to heal the nation, not by abolishing slavery but by placating the South yet again, so long as they remained in the Union. Southern tenacity for their disgusting “way of life” caused a five-year war in which 600,000 people died and more than a million were physically ruined.

Despite losing, the Southerners spent the next hundred years murdering non-whites (with the enthusiastic support of their Christain churches) and preventing them from exercising their rights. When the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed, the South, more caviling than ever, turned from Democrat (which it had become because of the ‘evil’ Abraham Lincoln) to Republican overnight, and it is the Republican Party which has ever since played to the insidious and ever-present racism and unexpurgated hatreds of these sick people.

Today, Barack Obama is as much white as black, but in America, that only means he’s black. Millions of racists will vote against him for that reason alone. And of course, the usual southern violence is raising its ugly head again, as calls “to kill him (Obama”) resonate through Republican political rallies. Recently, two whites were arrested while plotting to murder Obama. So it goes.

The now nearly 30-year-old political map of red and blue states is just the modern equivalent of the 19th century depiction of racist boundaries, not only within the American Geography but with the American soul as well. It has always been there and will not go away.

As a nation, we continue to be incredibly stupid. We are self-deluded enough to convince ourselves that indeed we are one nation, when we have never been anything of the sort. We are two countries, in states, in education, in decency and motivation. It is long past time we recognize that, to put it bluntly, we hate each other. We are divided by an enormous gulf which is filled with ignorance, ignorance supplied by Christians in particular, the “bible-belt” mental blankness that cycles the hatred of truth and common sense through the engine of southern society.

No president has successfully addressed these issues. Several tried in their times to make progress as the times allow (i.e. Truman’s integration of the Armed Forces, or Johnson’s Civil Rights Act). But these acts have been bandaids on a everlasting wound. Is it better for blacks today in America than it was in 1900? Of course. But has the underlying philosophy which enslaved them gone away? Never. Its practicioners have only learned, to be quiet, to be smiling and stealthy. It is upon this philosophy and through its adherents that anti-science, anti-truth, anti-human compassion continues unabated in America. American greatness was always a myth, now so more than ever.

The Current Candidates

Reading about these presidents has taught me a few things which relate to this election. First, the charge that Barack Obama is inexperienced and cannot be a good president is nonsense. Teddy Roosevelt had one year of legislative experience and two years as New York Governor - that’s it. And he was an excellent leader. Woodrow Wilson was president of Princeton and for two years Governor of New Jersey. Again, he was a great president.

What these books have taught me is that personal qualities make a good leader, not experience. So the primary dig the Republicans use against Obama is hogwash. But…it is also hogwash against Sarah Palin as well. Her lack of experience has little bearing on whether she’d make a good vice-president, or president.

What does Palin in is her lack of common sense. For the record, there is no doubt that, listening to Obama, one can hear leadership potential, while listening to Sarah Palin, one hears vapidity run rampant.

The best leaders in tough times - Washington, Teddy Roosevelt, Wilson, FDR, Kennedy (John Garfield might have been one given enough time) - had a very clear understanding of the truth of a situation, and could arrive at an effective and often (though not always) humane solution.

Neither presidential candidate inspires me to think they understand America’s current situation well enough to address it truthfully, and therefore, successfully. Obama’s health plan is convoluted, his economics squirrelly (though it is said he listens to Paul Volker which is a good sign). I realize that he’s a politician, but he’s the first non-white person in his position and he needs to address the fact that millions of Americans hate him because of his race. For a brief moment when his wife Michelle spoke the truth and said she wasn’t proud of

America, I thought we were on to something. But, of course, the political bosses got ahold of them both and they “explained” what they meant. Obama’s ‘we are not red states or blue states but united states’ shows either a singular lack of historical and contemporary knowledge or a willful decision to ignore reality. Either is not promising for an effective administration.

The other major point about Obama which annoys me is he has repeatedly said he would not pursue the immoral men who have run this rogue American government these past eight years. The likes of Bush, Cheney and Rumsfield need to be behind bars, or worse. And the fact that Obama doesn’t have the balls to rectify this disheartens me almost beyond words. What he is teaching these criminals is that they can get away with it. (Conservatives believe that anyway, they don’t need help.) Add to that such items as supporting the bailout, which overwhelmingly aided the rich and criminal, and as far as I can see Obama is not the man for the times so many think he is.

On…the…other…hand, John McCain appalls me. He is starkly ill-equiped to handle the American troubles of the 21st century. The “solutions” he offers weren’t sane back when Ronald Reagan proposed them nearly 30 years ago.

In 2000, after George Bush and Karl Rove destroyed McCain in the south with the rumor that McCain had had a black baby (appealing to the racist in most southerners), McCain was furious. Today he has hired Rove and gang to run his campaign. McCain’s sleazy decisions are no hallmark of the fortitude a leader needs to succeed in office.

His choice for his vice-president was even worse. Sarah Palin wants creationism taught in schools, repeatedly violated ethics laws as governor and mayor in Alaska (and is now under investigation for that), and singularly lacks an intelligence level capable of handling the complex issues in national office.

And she is the poster girl for hypocrisy in a conservative party which has elevated hypocrisy to the level of dogma. Her ‘no sex-ed in schools/abstenence’ policy has played havoc with her own family. At 43, she (it is said) gave birth to a baby with Down’s Syndrome (this after having four kids), and one of her high school girls is pregnant. Given those same facts in a liberal family, and the conservatives would cry “godless!” In this case, though, they are merely wonderful Christians working god’s msytery of life, or something. It’s all disgusting.

So where does that leave us? Presidential history suggests that the country will continue to limp along. It survived Rutherford Hayes and  Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge, it will survive Obama - who will win, let’s stop presending shall we? It may even get a bit better (certainly more so than had McCain won) But because these major ills will not be addressed, because Americans will not accept that they now live in a third-world country, because Americans don’t have the guts to face their own inbred, destructive habits, because Americans stubbornly refuse to deal with political and scientific reality, this country isn’t going to get very far.

I admit to being excited about an Obama presidency because it is different, and we have had the same - and a bad same - for 32 of the past 40 years, basically since Nixon was President. It is certain that on a bad day Obama is smarter than any three republicans, and it will be refreshing to have in office a mind which can comprehend the complexities of the 21st century world to enough extent to make bold attempts to meet it headon. The sad part is the ugly America, the tens of millions who vote for evil like Bush, who refuse to accept simple things like evolution, who think a gun is a right but good education isn’t, these moles will merely tuck themselves underground and wait four years, doing what they can to obstruct progress, and planing their cretinous return.

Nothing will change. Oh, except for a rollicking good party Tuesday night!