America needs a miracle
By no means just one of ‘em, either.
Easter Reflections: George Washington’s Farewell Address in Today’s America
George Washington’s exhortations and admonitions are residues of a lost and probably unrecoverable past. What that means for us now and in the future is sobering to contemplate.Sitting down the day before Easter, I thought I might say something about this most awful (in the old sense) holiday in the Christian calendar. But then Joseph R. Biden, the President of the United States, issued an official proclamation denominating March 31 as Transgender Day of Visibility. Farewell Easter! You just got superseded by the latest freak show in the great Democratic carnival of perversity.
I can’t compete with Transgender Day of Visibility. Nor can I compete with “Lizzo,” the kinky, obese black singer who performed for Joe Biden’s “grassroots” fundraiser at Radio City Music Hall last week. That event, which featured three presidents—Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, and Joe Biden—pulled in some $26 million for Biden’s 2024 presidential coffers. Tickets to the event topped out at $500,000 a pop. How’s that for a “grassroots” extravaganza? That same day, Donald Trump went to the wake for Jonathan Diller, the New York City cop who was gunned down in cold blood by Guy Rivera, a black ex-con who had 21 prior arrests. He also made a donation to a charitable organization to pay off the house mortgage for Diller’s widow.
I feel stymied by these contrasts, so I thought I would reprise, with some updates, a column featuring George Washington that I wrote for a prior Easter.
I recently chanced across a photograph of the lower Manhattan skyline at night from Good Friday in April 1956. Three skyscrapers dominating the space feature certain windows illuminated to form gigantic crosses to commemorate that most solemn of Christian holidays. The year 1956 was not that long ago. But how much has changed in those 60-odd years! Can you imagine such a public display of Christian affirmation in New York today? Nor can I.
That was then. Now things are different. As I write, New York Governor Kathy Hochul, following Joe Biden, has herself delivered a proclamation announcing that March 31, Easter Sunday, will be celebrated as Transgender Day of Visibility throughout the state. In order to observe this new holiday, various landmarks, including One World Trade Center, the Kosciuszko Bridge, and Niagara Falls, will be lit with the colors of the transgender flag.
I thought about such disjunctions between then and now when reading through Washington’s Farewell Address recently. Washington had intended to withdraw from politics when his first term ended in 1792. He asked James Madison to draft a valedictory statement but, when the time came, bickering among some of his Cabinet, especially between Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton, convinced him to run again. He set the original document aside.
But when 1796 rolled around, he was weary and determined to leave politics. He enlisted Hamilton to revise the statement, to which he added his own observations. The document is known as Washington’s “Farewell Address,” though Washington did not deliver it orally. Instead, he had it published in Claypoole’s American Daily Advertiser in September 1796, about 10 weeks before the election to choose his successor.
It was widely reprinted and became, in the words of the historian John Avlon, a sort of “civic scripture,” more widely reprinted even than the Declaration of Independence in the early years of the Republic. During the Civil War, both Houses of Congress began to hold annual readings of the document. The House abandoned the practice in 1984. The Senate continues the tradition to this day, selecting a senator (and alternating between parties) to read the document aloud on the Senate floor to commemorate Washington’s birthday.
Several passages from the Farewell Address have become inscribed on the collective memory of the nation. But what struck me rereading the 6,200-word statement is how much it appears as a period piece, a blast from an apparently unrecoverable past. Anyone who has read the Farewell Address will recall Washington’s stirring warnings against “the fury of party spirit,” foreign entanglements, his cautions against excessive debt, and his insistence on the place of religion as the foundation for civic order. The question is: what relevance do such injunctions have in present-day America?
…Finally, there is the matter of morality and its basis, religion. We modern sophisticates tend to blush when the subject of religion is broached. We mewl about “the separation of church and state” and wait for the moment we can utter the word “fundamentalist” to dismiss our opponents.
George Washington, however, was not a member of that anti-Christian church. Indeed, in one of the most famous passages of the Farewell Address, he stipulates that “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports.” In case we didn’t get it the first time, he proceeds to drive the point home. “In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens. The mere politician, equally with the pious man, ought to respect and to cherish them.”
Okay, he says we ought to have regard for morality. For such an Enlightenment figure as George Washington, morality surely does not encompass or stand upon religion.
But it does. “Let us with caution,” he writes, “indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.”
Well, that was then. We’ve made such progress since 1796. We have embraced our hatred and antipathies with uncommon zeal, to the point where the words “secession” and “national divorce” are once again circulating in earnest. A snarling partisan spirit is alive and rancorous. We have in all essentials transformed ourselves from a republic into an oligarchy, trampling on such quaint guardrails as the separation and disbursement of powers. We have loaded ourselves—or, rather, we have been loaded—with eye-watering, incomprehensible mountains of debt. And we have loudly rejected the claims of traditional morality and religion as so many otiose and unprogressive holdovers from a discredited past.
Like those crosses outlined in light on the Manhattan skyline at night, George Washington’s exhortations and admonitions are residues of a lost and probably unrecoverable past. What that means for us now and in the future is sobering to contemplate. But this is Easter, a holiday commemorating a miracle. That is good, because we are going to need one.
We do at that, all the moreso with the bloated central government firmly in the talons of soulless demon-spawned fiends who would dare to piss all over Easter Sunday by replacing it with a “Transgender Day Of Visibility”—as if so-called “transgenders” weren’t the most visible, in-your-face minority in Amerika v2.0 already.
As I stated earlier, I’ll have more on that rancid obscenity tomorrow, as well as this accompanying profanation.
Joe Biden is fond of talking about being a Catholic, but he seems to have forgotten the meaning of the holy day of Easter.
Perhaps to him, it’s just that day when the Easter Bunny has to chase him around to prevent him from getting lost and saying something stupid.
This year, they’re holding an Easter egg design contest for the children of National Guard members. The theme is supposed to be celebrating National Guard families. But, guess what is forbidden in the designs? Any religious mention of Easter on the egg.
The rules for the contest state that an Easter egg design submission “must not include any questionable content, religious symbols, overtly religious themes, or partisan political statements.”
Now they may not want to display anything that appears to be endorsing a religion.
Oh, absolutely. We must all be mindful of the tender sensibilities of all those Moslems, Buddhists, Hindus, Taoists, Zoroastrians, &c who wish to celebrate Easter at the White House, right? I mean, there’s gotta be many, many thousands of ’em, if not millions, right? Only a H8RR Christianist ogre would ever dream of leaving them out.
Even then, they should have constructed this as something that doesn’t come across as forbidding religious expression.
But that’s the Biden team, just a complete mess when it comes to doing the simplest of things, including just recognizing the Easter holiday.
This is the same White House that managed to have a topless transgender activist at the White House during a pride event, but you won’t let kids reference religion during an Easter celebration?
Well, naturally. I mean, the horned, cloven-hoofed devils are for the former, and ag’in the latter. If you haven’t figured that out by now, you really need to start paying closer attention. Biden’s putative “Catholicism” remains exactly what it has been all along: a pose, a political prop to help him swindle his way into office, nothing more. Y’know, like the dog, the Corvette, the sunglasses, the “wife,” all the other affectations.
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