Ordinarily people like me (English-speaking heterosexual white males who don’t practice a non-Christian religion) should be the last Americans to complain about prejudice.
It’s clear my age-alike peers and I are being victimized by an insidious plot. But who (or what) is behind it? The government? The Illuminati? The Russians? The Dallas Cowboys? Whoever they are, their plan has been diabolically effective.
In elementary school we were told that anyone could grow up to be America’s president. George Washington and John Adams, both of whom were born in the 1730s, were proof of that.
As decades elapsed, a wide variety of straight white males (and occasionally their families) took up residence in the White House, including Thomas Jefferson, who was born in the 1740s; James Madison and James Monroe (1750s). and John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson (1760s). William Henry Harrison represented the 1770s, Martin Van Buren and Zachary Taylor the 1780s, and John Tyler, James Polk, and James Buchanan the 1790s. Millard Fillmore (1800) was technically born in the 18th century as well, but for this essay a given year’s first two digits are the only significant ones.
The 19th century’s initial decade saw the births of Andrew Johnson (1808) and Abraham Lincoln (1809), confirming what should have been obvious: the inherent fairness of having at least one American commander-in-chief born every decade. But then came a presidential-birth-free ten-year stretch, the eighteen-teens. Thankfully people born between 1810 and 1819 probably weren’t aware of the historical injustice they’d suffered, given the nation’s limited history at the time. But fairness returned with the 1820s (Ulysses Grant and Rutherford Hayes), and at least one future American chief executive was born in the 1830s (James Garfield, Benjamin Harrison, Grover Cleveland), 1840s (William McKinley), 1850s (Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson), 1860s (Warren Harding), 1870s (Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover), 1880s (Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman). 1890s (Dwight Eisenhower), and nineteen-aughts (Lyndon Johnson).
The nineteen-teens were teeming with future presidents (Ronald Reagan, Gerald Ford, Richard Nixon, and John F. Kennedy), and Jimmy Carter and George H. W. Bush were both born in 1924. The 1930s got skipped, but understandably, given the domestic (Great Depression) and foreign (rise of Hitler’s Germany and Imperial Japan) situations during that particular decade. Presidents Clinton, George W. Bush, Trump and Biden were all born in the 1940s, and a youthful (during his presidency) Barack Obama was born in the 1960s.
But speaking for 1950s natives everywhere, where’s our president?
It looks increasingly likely that when it comes to presidential births, the 1950s are destined to be snubbed, since neither Donald Trump (1946) nor Kamala Harris (1964) qualifies.
The youngest 1950s natives will be 69 years old in 2028, when the leading presidential hopefuls will likely include Ron DeSantis (born 1978), Corey Booker (1969), Nikki Haley (1972), Pete Buttigieg (1982), Ted Cruz (1970), Bernie Sanders (1941), Gretchen Whitmer (1971), and J. D. Vance (1984).
At least the eighteen-teens (John Fremont in 1856) and the 1930’s (Michael Dukakis in 1988) each got a major party presidential candidate. Not only has no 1950s native ever gotten the Republican or Democratic nomination, the only 1950s-born vice-president nominee was John Edwards, a man best remembered for cheating on his cancer-stricken wife. Can’t our decade do better than that?
To my fellow 1950s natives, we’ve been hornswoggled. That fairy tale that claimed anybody can grow up to be president? Balderdash.
None of us ever had a chance.
Curse you, Dallas Cowboys! <
No comments:
Post a Comment