February 12, 2009, Milestones
As I frequently allude to, we live in amazingly self-absorbed times. How self-absorbed? Well, sometime today this humble blog will reach it's 500,000th site-view... no... where was I... Oh yes...
Today, while we should celebrate the simultaneous bicentennials (today, people!) of the births of Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln, both pictured above, this event is pretty much by and large ignored. To be fair to our current President, he's been in office 23 days now; this sort of thing would have been the responsibility of his predecessor. Well, we can certainly see why the Bush Administration wouldn't have spent any time planning for any Darwin celebrations: after all, his very existence "was just a theory". As to Lincoln, however, the guy was the first Republican President... not to mention the original Republican "War Monger President".
But seeing as Lincoln didn't carry a single Southern state (and managed to win his second election without the South even voting)... he doesn't count. I mean, let's face it: he was no Ronald Reagan. Still, you'd think our new President, being our (actual) first Black President and being our (only President besides Lincoln) from Illinois might try to make a bigger deal about the Lincoln bicentennial... but to be fair, he's been in office around three weeks... and he has some other things going on... so on this (unlike, say, "state secrets," which do harken back to Lincoln and his rounding up and jailing war opponents from right off the streets), I'll just cut the President some slack.
But as for the rest of youse... say happy boithday to Chuck and Abe...