December 22
In case you haven’t noticed, politics and politicians all around the world have recently been pretty obviously making poor decisions, screwing things up, and being generally incompetent. But wait, it’s December 22, which means there’s a long list of similarly idiotic actions taken by politicians, going back a long, long time. Not as far back as politicians have existed of course, but that’s only because we haven’t been keeping good records for that long.
Take December 22, 1807 in the US as an example. That’s the day the Embargo Act of 1807 was enacted, which attempted to shut down all trade transacted by ships with the US. That constituted all the trade transacted with the US, and it cost the US at least 5% of the young (at that point) country’s gross national product. It also raised international tensions and caused the US diplomats in European capitals no end of headaches. It was supposed to stop British ships from harassing US ships and their sailors. That, of course, is the one thing it didn’t do.
December 22 in 1851 started with something we probably can’t find a way to blame politicians for: the US Library of Congress burned down. Two-thirds of the books in the library were destroyed. Now, this was the Library of Congress, the first “official library” of the US. So the politicians (that is, Congress) voted to spend money to replace the lost books. But they drew the line at the library acquiring any new materials they hadn’t already had prior to the fire. After all, why would politicians need to consult any information about discoveries, inventions, theories, or developments that continued to happen after 1851? The “no new materials” policy was eventually changed, but if you scan the current US Congress, you might think that they still adhered to the principle of not knowing anything that happened after 1851.
Moving ahead to 1888, December 22 marked the Christmas Meeting of 1888, which is thought to be the beginning of the independence movement in the Faroe Islands. The Faroe Islands were part of Denmark, even though they were nearly a thousand miles away, the residents didn’t speak Danish, and they had their own culture and history, neither of which had much to do with Denmark. Since it made perfect sense for the Faroe Islands to become independent of a country that they didn’t have much in common with, the politicians hurried to work. The Faroe Islands became a self-governing autonomous area within Denmark. And it only took six decades.
Politicians in France convened on December 22, 1894 to convict Alfred Dreyfus of treason, for sharing French military secrets with the German Embassy. They sent him to the Devil’s Island penal colony where he endured terrible conditions for five years until the actual spy, an officer in the French army named Ferdinand Esterhazy, was identified. The political establishment reacted quick to…suppress the information about Esterhazy and sentence Dreyfus to another ten years. It took public pressure to get Dreyfus pardoned and reinstated as an officer. And the actual guilty party, Esterhazy? He was promptly punished, right? Not exactly. He retired and moved to the UK, where he lived out a comfortable retirement.
That’s just a smattering from the 1800s, and the 1900s is at least as bad when it comes to politicians. There are a lot more examples, but that may very well be because the one area where humanity seems to enjoy consistent progress is keeping records of things. Germany was divided into two parts in the 1940s, then on December 22 in 1989 the Brandenburg Gate reopened and that whole stupid idea was scrapped. On December 22, 2010, another stupid idea was scrapped — the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy in the US military.
Among other badges of…well, not honor…earned by politicians in the current century was December 22, 2018, when they managed to shut down the entire US federal government for the longest stretch in history. Since that also included the politicians, you could make a reasonable argument that it wasn’t an entirely bad idea.
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