Who Is That On The Fifty Dollar Bill?

It is good to have a day to reflect. That's what President's Day Weekend is all about. I say this because the kids at my school are stuck on The Big Three: Washington, Lincoln and Obama. If you ask a first grader to name more than three, it might cause their little heads to cave in on themselves. Many of our fourth and fifth graders will add Martin Luther King to that list, but that's where they stop. They've named ten percent of the total and only managed to get seventy-five percent of those answers correct.
It is true that when I was a kid there was less to know. We were still in the thirties, president-wise. It was much easier to keep track of a couple dozen chief executives. My mother told me once that the thing that made Franklin Roosevelt's passing so difficult for so many, including herself, was that he was the only president that most of them could remember, what with all that four terms in office and all. Since then there have been a number of two-termers, and a flurry of one-termers to fill out that list, but the group I deal with have relative difficulty coming up with the guy that they were so glad to get rid of just one election ago.
To that end, I blame our process. When a pointy-headed terror like Kim Jong-il gets a bronze statue erected to him after decades of oppression and torture of his own people, it makes you wonder if four years is too short for our limited attention span. The idea of a president-for-life gives us all a chance to get familiar and even to grow comfortable with that ruler's imperfections. It might cut down on the monstrous expense of our current election cycle, too. For now, however, we'll have to celebrate the ones we can recall.