From “The Tyranny of Presidents’ Day,” by Roy Lincoln Karp, in the February 1992 issue of The Free Spirit, a journal published by students at LaGuardia High School, in New York City.
Recently there has been a trend in this country of taking the birthdays of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln and combining them into a new holiday called Presidents’ Day. Although there is no official holiday known as Presidents’ Day, the phrase has begun to appear frequently in advertisements, on calendars, and in people’s conversations.
A tyrant would love the idea of Presidents’ Day, for it is a step toward the worship of all presidents. It is based on the premise that all leaders should be praised simply because they are leaders. It steals from the glory of the true heroes of this country, like Washington and Lincoln, as well as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and redistributes it equally among all our presidents, including the nearly impeached Richard M. Nixon.
“Stiffen your spine not your heart.”
I don’t like to talk about politics on Facebook– political history is my job, after all, and you are my friends– but there is an important non-partisan point to make today.
What Bannon is doing, most dramatically with last night’s ban on immigration from seven predominantly Muslim countries– is creating what is known as a “shock event.” Such an event is unexpected and confusing and throws a society into chaos. People scramble to react to the event, usually along some fault line that those responsible for the event can widen by claiming that they alone know how to restore order. When opponents speak out, the authors of the shock event call them enemies. As society reels and tempers run high, those responsible for the shock event perform a sleight of hand to achieve their real goal, a goal they know to be hugely unpopular, but from which everyone has been distracted as they fight over the initial event. There is no longer concerted opposition to the real goal; opposition divides along the partisan lines established by the shock event.
Last night’s Executive Order has all the hallmarks of a shock event. It was not reviewed by any governmental agencies or lawyers before it was released, and counterterrorism experts insist they did not ask for it. People charged with enforcing it got no instructions about how to do so. Courts immediately have declared parts of it unconstitutional, but border police in some airports are refusing to stop enforcing it.
Predictably, chaos has followed and tempers are hot.
My point today is this: unless you are the person setting it up, it is in no one’s interest to play the shock event game. It is designed explicitly to divide people who might otherwise come together so they cannot stand against something its authors think they won’t like. I don’t know what Bannon is up to– although I have some guesses– but because I know Bannon’s ideas well, I am positive that there is not a single person whom I consider a friend on either side of the aisle– and my friends range pretty widely– who will benefit from whatever it is. If the shock event strategy works, though, many of you will blame each other, rather than Bannon, for the fallout. And the country will have been tricked into accepting their real goal.
