Happy Presidents’ Day
We used to celebrate the birthdays of Presidents Washington and Lincoln because of the excellent qualities they had as leaders.
Then we decided to junk that practice in favor of a single day celebrating all presidents. Today we celebrate George W. Bush, Richard Nixon, Herbert Hoover, Woodrow Wilson … all of them, good and bad. In fact, that we set aside a holiday for presidents suggests that there’s no such thing as a bad president. They are all our treasured dear leaders, worthy of adulation and respect.
Just one more step in our slide towards authoritarianism.
— DVJ
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About
Boston Review is a magazine of ideas, independent and nonprofit. We cover lots of ground—politics, poetry, film, fiction, book reviews, and criticism. But a few premises tie it all together: that democracy depends on public discussion; that sometimes understanding means going deep; that vast inequalities are unjust; that human imagination breaks free from neat political categories; and that powerful images are worth piles of words.
