Alexander Hamilton: Immigrant, bastard, patriot

Had Alexander Hamilton died taking Redoubt Ten at Yorktown, bayonets fixed and muskets unloaded, he would have died a more significant American than his fellow Columbia student Barack Obama, who has now deigned to displace him from the ten dollar bill. To charge across that field under the flash of British artillery, rush into a hail of British musket fire, leap first over the parapet yelling for his fellow Patriots to follow and fight and by so doing win their freedom would have been enough for the man who had no father but became ours. He did not need to write and curate The Federalist; he did not need to construct the Constitution; he did not need to establish the U.S. Mint; he did not need to save the nation from financial calamity; he did not need to, in the aftermath of the 1800 election and in his dying act, destroy the political fortunes of the conniving traitor and would-be tyrant Aaron Burr.

Hamilton recognized Burr as a man without principle, bent on power for powers sake, who hated the Founding Fathers even as he envied their influence. He would recognize our current leadership today for its similarities. This administration has made Hamilton a casualty of the era of daily venal vituperation of people who do not care about history. We live in an era where the demands of a minor social justice warrior Twitter mob which insists upon a foothold in American currency and a casting aside of our history in favor of the priorities of modern identity politics, and under the leadership of an elite which does not care that they are wrong—and in fact is so bold as to use that to their advantage. And thus, our orphan immigrant Founding Father who fought to abolish the slave trade at the Constitutional Convention is deemed insufficient as a fulfillment of our progressive self-actualization process.

It seems so fitting in catering to our modern ignorance: Obama’s choice of which American to remove from money is the man who invented American money: “America’s currency makes a statement about who we are and what we stand for as a nation,” said Treasury Secretary Jack Lew.