Essays in Idleness

George Washington’s birthday is still observed (on a first Monday instead of on the actual day by the Julian or Gregorian calendar), in the United States — at least, in the Republican (“fascist”) tradition. Those who lean Democratic have gone mostly Woke/Satanist, and may wish to protest the fact that Washington, along with the other wealthy Founding Fathers, owned slaves. He inherited them, O lucky man, along with considerable land holdings, including the Plantation at Little Hunting Creek, which was renamed Mount Vernon — within an easy cart-ride of Alexandria, Virginia. His white, cisgendered, Anglican family had owned some of that property since 1674, and the founding president extended it. Slaves thus proved useful — as they had through humanity’s universal past. Washington was good to his slaves, said the old narrative.

Sir John A. Macdonald, the first prime minister of Canada, while also white, cisgendered, and Anglican (though truth be told he converted from Presbyterian), has also been spurned and repudiated by the progressively smug, though he could not own slaves. For the (spurned, repudiated) first lieutenant-governor of Upper Canada, Lord Simcoe, had abolished the importation of slaves in 1793, so that any surviving slave would have croaked from old age by Macdonald’s time. Instead, charges against Macdonald have been stitched together from the way he treated Indians (letting some go to residential schools), the Metis (allowing an insurrectionist murderer to be hanged), and immigrants from China (imposing a “head tax,” of fifty dollars). … Boo! boo! bad man! as my little sister would say, who was rather Woke from the age of four.

We do not celebrate prime ministers’ birthdays in Canada, except that I understand December 25th is the Nativity of Justin Trudeau. But instead of Washington’s Birthday, when leading capitalist enterprises may wish to close north of the border, the way they do to the south, we devised Family Day — or whatever it is called by the whim of politicians outside Ontario.

But family is a form of slavery, and may be heteronormative, and thus opposed to transgenderism. Moreover, a family that breeds children is an affront to the woman’s right to an abortion; as well as to the pregnancy rights of a deadnamed male. I do not see how anything like a “family day” can be allowed to stand.