Tuesday, August 24, 2004

George gets the Queer Eye treatment

Just So You Know

Historians at Mount Vernon (just a stone’s throw from the Buckethead Happy Funtyme Compound on the banks of the Potomac) are engaged in a project to make over the image of George Washington, and it’s ‘bout time. The popular image of Washington (as appears on the dollar bill, etc.) is of George as an old man, stooped and withered and suffering from sore and swollen gums. The younger man was quite different. Every book I read on the late Colonial period and early Republic describe George Washington as a large, rawboned man with red hair, ruddy features, and an undeniable presence, a social gravity, even when sitting quietly. He looked every inch a Commander-in-chief, an image that the popular Gilbert Stuart painting can’t possibly convey.

If you’re like me, you have the need to put faces to the names you read about. That’s simple when reading a biography of say, Benjamin Disraeli or Ben Franklin, that includes numerous portraits of the man. But in Washington’s case, not many portraits exist (not that many reliable ones, anyway), and it just doesn’t sit right with me to envision an old man with an infected mouth marching through the mountains of Western Pennsylvania under General Braddock or accepting the peace at Yorktown.

Unfortunately for my fevered brain, there is only one current public figure who looks anything like George Washington at all. Reddish hair, gone gray: check. Tall, physically imposing: check. Lumpy nose: check. Ruddy features: check. Charisma: check. That’s right, America. In my head, a young George Washington looks like nobody more than William Jefferson Clinton.

Help me, somebody.


Posted by Johno on 08/24/04 at 01:32 PM
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