George Washington’s exhortations and admonitions are residues of a lost and probably unrecoverable past. What that means for us now and in the future is sobering to contemplate.
I feel stymied by these contrasts, so I thought I would reprise, with some updates, a column featuring George Washington that I wrote for a prior Easter.
I thought about such disjunctions between then and now when reading through Washington's Farewell Address recently.
The document is known as Washington's "Farewell Address," though Washington did not deliver it orally.
Anyone who has read the Farewell Address will recall Washington's stirring warnings against "The fury of party spirit," foreign entanglements, his cautions against excessive debt, and his insistence on the place of religion as the foundation for civic order.
Devotion to the union, Washington says near the beginning of the address, is "The palladium of your political safety and prosperity." What a splendid deployment of the word "Palladium," a "Safeguard" or "Protection," from Παλλάδιον, a statue of Pallas Athena that guarded Troy!
Yes, we are, and, as Washington warned, such divisions, quite apart from the domestic squalor they foster, open "The door to foreign influence and corruption, which find a facilitated access to the government itself through the channels of party passions." Has President Xi read the Farewell Address?
George Washington was not a member of that anti-Christian church.
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