Hot off the presses is this week’s strip, another in our series of “PORTRAITS OF GREATNESS,” the slow and shoddy portraiture of each of our nation’s (if America is your nation) presidents. This week’s subject: Jazzy Thomas Jefferson!
I will say, regardless of any ironic content that may accidentally find its way into these little profiles, most of these early “founding father” types are pretty impressive dudes. You have to remember that most people were autodidacts at this point, at least to some degree, and there was no such thing as the Internet, television, radio, even TELEGRAPH, as a means of spreading information. So you had to bust your hump to get smart–you couldn’t do it accidentally, as most of us have.
Thomas Jefferson was not quite a Renaissance Man, insofar as he wasn’t a super painter, mathematician, all that stuff, like Da Vinci. This is not to say that he wasn’t an impressive storehouse of knowledge. From the Wikipedia article I totally ripped for all the source material:
When President John F. Kennedy welcomed forty-nine Nobel Prize winners to the White House in 1962 he said, “I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent and of human knowledge that has ever been gathered together at the White House–with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.”
This is something that pretty much all of the Founding Fathers have in common–they were all incredibly smart people, who found themselves in a position to literally create an entire government out of whole cloth, and did it. They all had foibles, as I take pains to point out in my little cartoons, but they were the foibles of statesmen. This is one of the things I find so enervating about our current president–in Barack Obama are married a powerful intellect, comprehensive education, and the personal charisma of a statesman. Oops, I let my crush on Obama show a little bit–sorry!
In case my older brother Ken is reading this–hello, Ken!–I have to give him a shout-out, as we argued through most of the hamburger and hotdog I had at my father and niece Breanna’s combo birthday party today. The subject was whether or not it was right to revisit some of the less savory elements of these guys’ histories, using the mores and cultural attitudes of today. In this case, me pointing out that Jefferson owned slaves, which I find endlessly fascinating/repulsive, especially considering the fact that he supported abolition. But (again, according to Wikipedia), apparently he was too mired in debt and financial obligation to free his slaves? I find this puzzling and a little hard to believe, but I guess if it’s on Wikipedia it must be true.
This sort of argument, that something was part of the cultural landscape at the time and therefore, while unfortunate, must be viewed within its context… well, I don’t like it. I hear it a lot in the comic book world in regards to Tintin In The Congo, the second of the world-famous Tintin books, originally published in the 20’s. The Africans in the book are depicted as little more than bumbling ignorant savages out of some minstrel show. People call it “typical of colonial attitudes of the time,” but I just call it “straight racist.” I mean, right? Tintin’s creator Herge later expressed some guilt over the thing, and subsequent volumes of Tintin weren’t nearly so racially charged (unless you’re Japanese).
My point: brilliant people are often flawed. Sometimes moreso than their less brilliant counterparts. You can’t travel back in time and convince Thomas Jefferson to just say “Screw It, I’m The President” and free all his slaves, regardless of his debts or whatever. You can’t get that stain out of Monica Lewinsky’s pantsuit either. But you can most definitely be awake to history and watch out for the same malarkey from this generation’s brilliant men.
Okay, I’m all done. I’m late for bed.
