We Over-Honor Our Presidents

I feel the same way as I told my wife.

Today the stock market will be closed, the federal government shut down, the mail will not be delivered and classes will be suspended. Why? George H.W. Bush died.

Irrespective of whether he was a great man or a poor one, George H. W. Bush was a public employee. He was not a king. He was not a pope. He did not found or save or design the republic. To shut down our civil society for a day in order to mark his peaceful passing is to invert the appropriate relationship between the citizen and the state, and to take yet another step toward the fetishization of an executive branch whose role is supposed to be more bureaucratic than spiritual, but that has come of late to resemble Caesar more than to resemble Coolidge.

In life they derided him and called him an elitist, clueless about real people and a Nazi (a title they give all Republicans).  Now that he's dead his political enemies on the Left call him a good guy. 

But he was a one term president and was elected to be Ronald Reagan's third term.  He had the good fortune to preside over the global successes of the Sainted Reagan. 

He did OK and lived a good, long life. 

RIP.