Good evening. I am so glad you could take a few minutes off from your busy holiday schedule to drop by. I'm sure most of you already have your decorations up and will probably spend tomorrow preparing for the big Presidents Eve parties you are throwing or attending. And then, of course, come the Presidents Day festivities. What with the parades and all, it makes for a very festive holiday.
What? Your town doesn't have a Presidents Day parade? No fireworks? No parties? The schools don't close? You don't even get the day off from work? The only way you knew it was Presidents Day was from the sales inserts in the paper? Where the hell do you live? Oh, the United States. Oh, I see. That explains a lot.
Isn't it remarkable that a country that purports to have so much respect for the Founding Fathers can't take one day a year to commemorate their achievements?
At the risk of revealing my age, I am barely old enough to remember when we actually observed the birthdays of both Presidents Washington and Lincoln on their actual birthdays. Perhaps some of you didn't know about that, but it is true. My first three years in school, these birthdays were a big deal.
I started school at the age of 4. (Way back in those days, there wasn't a fixed age for starting school. If you could read, you could start first grade. When you could read without following the line along with your index finger, you could skip to the third grade.) So I can remember how we observed the birthdays of both presidents -- actually on their respective birthdays. We made decorations, we read stories, we learned about wooden teeth and cherry tree myths and honesty and reading by candlelight. We learned about the importance of hard work and that anyone who was willing to work hard could become president. And we learned it was important to respect and honor those who had distinguished themselves in service to our country.
But that all ended in 1968 with the Uniform Monday Holiday Bill, which relegated the honoring of our presidents and the qualities of honesty and dedication to public service they represented to the scrap heap. In fact, it is even worse than I thought. According to Wikipedia,
reviewing the Uniform Monday Holiday Bill debate of 1968 in the Congressional Record, one notes that supporters of the Bill were intent on moving federal holidays to Mondays to promote business
Great. Is it any wonder there is so little respect for what were once considered American values -- like honesty, hard work, and public service -- or for the office of the President, for that matter. After all, it's just another day to try to wring another dollar out of the unaware public. Remember when shrub was asked how we could support the troops and he replied, "go shopping"?
Although Lincoln's birthday is already past, I wanted to take a minute to celebrate Washington's birthday by sharing with you this remarkable sand painting by Andrew Clemens. Born in 1857 in Dubuque, IA, Clemens became deaf at the age of 12. A few years later he began making these remarkable sand paintings. They are all made from naturally occurring sand colors, from the Pikes Peak State Park near McGregor, Iowa, where Clemens lived most of his life.
This particular example is considered his masterpiece and was created as a gift to his mother. Think about who he chose to represent in his masterwork. Clemens certainly seemed to understand and appreciate Washington's enormous contributions to our country.
The detail in this piece is fantastic. The jar stands about 16 inches tall. One of the most amazing things is that the entire piece is created upside down, then sealed, capped, and inverted. According to an evaluator on Antiques Roadshow, it is valued at around $50,000. It is owned by the State Historical Society of Iowa and exhibited at their museum in Des Moines.
According to geologist Michael Welland:
In what is today Pikes Peak State Park, the classic Paleozoic formations of the central U.S. form bluffs and gullies along the Mississippi River, among them the Ordovician St. Peter Sandstone. This classic sandstone is famously pure and white, its well-rounded quartz grains providing the raw material for glass-making and other applications. But at Pictured Rocks, waters percolating down through the overlying limestones, charged with a variety of minerals, have stained the St. Peter with a dazzling palette of natural colours.
Clemens loved this place, and collected a spectrum of sand samples of subtly different hues, greens, reds, browns, yellows, grays and blues. Back home, he would carefully sort the grains by both colour and size, and then go to work. In bottles of different sizes and types, he would, grain-by-grain, construct small works of art. Using specially devised tools - fish hooks and wands made of hickory - he would sort and position his fine-grained sands into, at first, geometrical designs and later, as he developed his incredible craft, meticulously detailed images.
So Monday (or Tuesday, if you want to be accurate), pause a minute to remember President Washington and the virtues of honor, honesty, bravery, and service that he embodied. And then remember Andrew Clemens, the young deaf artist, who used his creativity and handmade tools to craft the sands of the Paleozoic into a tribute to our first president.
Before you rush off, here is a word from our sponsors. . . .
We have so many insightful and powerful diaries written here at Daily Kos. Our diaries inform, inflame, impassion, and even entertain. We Kossacks have strong voices and an even stronger will to be the change we wish to see in this country.
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Tonight's Top Comments. . . .
From Julie Gulden:
Magnifico shows what is still to come ... or not in elfling's DK4 Update story. Here are your badges folks!
This comment from punditician is waay too funny to pass up in eclectablog's diary Epic Tea Party FAIL.
From
eyesoars:
I nominate this photo comment of Egyptians supporting Wisconsin protesters from valadon in absdoggy's diary A Few Words on Wisconsin.
From
Dragon5616:
In TobyRocksSoHard's rescued diary The Importance of Primaries, Local Elections, and the Situation in Wisconsin, autoegocrat reminds us that winning a primary is not rocket science.
In kos's Saturday hate mail-a-palooza, Dolly Madison asks the question and lineatus provides the answer about wingnuts' obsession with anatomy.
I got some good laughs from the thread that followed inclusiveheart's observation about a teabagger "counter protester" in Wisconsin. KibbutzAmiad, CalbraithRodgers, Atilla the Honey Bunny (great handle!), and LivesInAShoe all get off a zinger in Al Rodgers' recommended 70,000 in Solidarity (Photo Diary)
From
blueoregon:
I'd like to nominate a comment by Hannah, who saw this issue in a way i didn't until she explained it. I thought everyone needed to see this. The diary is - Rachel Maddow Nails It.
EDITOR'S NOTE: This comment appeared in last night's Top Comments diary, but it is so profound, I really think it bears repeating.
From
me:
hannah makes an important point about Obama's tepid support for Wisconsin unions: when people are being attacked, authority that stands silent becomes complicit, in President Obama gave the wrong weekend address by roubs.
bronte 17 makes a powerful argument along with an informative link in Lisa Lockwood's call to action: Anonymous: Juin Us, A call to arms.