Jack Lew nears decision to keep Hamilton on front of $10 bill, put a woman on the $20

Jack Lew nears decision to keep Hamilton on front of $10 bill, put a woman on the $20

That surely makes more sense to me. I think we've already given Jackson a lot more honor than he ever earned. He was a racist, of course, and an early proponent of ethnic cleansing, but I have to give him his props. He was no ordinary racist. He had it down to a ground-breaking science, making him the Albert Einstein of racism. His go-to move was the racism double-dip. With a single bold move (the Indian Removal Act) he managed to take away land from several Indian tribes and give it to whites in slave states, thus managing to fuck both Native Americans and African Americans in one fell swoop. Then, by trying to buy Texas from Mexico, he hoped to create a new slave state in the USA (Mexico had abolished slavery in 1829), thereby fucking Mexicans and African Americans at the same time.

I don't necessarily support renaming everything named after him in this country and tearing down his statues, ala Stalin and Lenin's fate overseas, but I have to admit that neither would I oppose any such actions. Getting his picture off our currency, however, is the right move, symbolizing that we are willing to remake our country into one that is more inclusive than the one envisioned by Ol' Hickory.

To be fair to Jackson, he was a helluva general. On January 8th, 1815, he engineered and commanded perhaps the most stunning victory in military history - not just in America, but in all the annals of human war since time immemorial. That was the first assault of the Battle of New Orleans. Although the British invasion force outnumbered Jackson's force nearly 2-to-1, The Americans won so decisively that the confrontation turned out to be less a battle than a massacre. The British Army lost 2600 men that day (700 dead, 1400 wounded, 500 surrendered), while Jackson's combined American forces lost thirteen. That's no misprint. I don't mean thirteen hundred. Just thirteen. (Seven killed, six wounded.)

And the entire battle lasted less than half an hour!

It was such an unqualified triumph that for about forty years America would celebrate January 8th as festively as July 4th. It was probably that battle which propelled Ol' Hickory to the White House, where he, like so many of us, was finally promoted to his level of incompetence.

Sidebars:

1. Jackson won that great triumph in Louisiana with the assistance of 462 free black men of the Louisiana militia and 52 Choctaw warriors. He would symbolically reward their fine and loyal service by trying to extend slavery into the West, by owning and profiting from slaves himself, and by re-locating the Choctaw from their ancestral lands, along with several other tribes. I'm telling you, he was truly a genius at racism!

2. Today we celebrate January 8th as National Bubble Bath Day. Please don't tell those people who are always railing against the Wussification of America. I think it is safe to say that Ol' Hickory never took a bubble bath or, for that matter, probably not any other kind of bath either. According to legend, when he became President, he specifically ordered the bathtub to be removed from the White House. (Something about preventing people from thinking he was a dandy, as if that were a possibility!)