You Shouldn't Have to Work Today

It's Super Bowl Monday, and you're hung over and useless

This column was written in advance. By the time this auto-posts on Monday morning, I’ll be clinging on to my bed like it’s a mechanical bull while I pray for the room to stop spinning, wondering if you really can cure a hangover with a scoop of ice cream in tomato juice. Luckily, I’m a blogger, so all I have to do in the afternoon is lie on my bathroom floor and throw up flavors of Doritos that God never intended, instead of, say, preparing a legal brief or teaching third grade while throwing up flavors of Doritos that God never intended.

The day after the Super Bowl should be a national holiday. It already sort of is: An estimated 17 million people call in sick on Super Bowl Monday, resulting in about $4 billion in lost productivity. Kids in Cincinnati will get the day off today, which is good, because the Bengals were in the Super Bowl and kids from Cincinnati drink like absolute fucking machines. One of my friends in college was a six year-old from Norwood and it was unreal how much he could put away.

Cody was a legend.

There’s at least one good argument against making Super Bowl Monday a holiday: Every day can’t be a holiday. People want all sorts of holidays: 1,100 have been sought over the years. Each holiday costs an estimated $818 billion in taxpayer money to executive branch workers alone, and there’s lost productivity other places because many businesses follow the federal calendar. So, there has to be a limit; we can’t have National Putting Olives On Your Fingers Day followed by Federal The Guy Who Played Urkel Day and so on. We shouldn’t become Southern Europe, where from June to September, every store operates on an “open when you feel like it” schedule, so if you need to buy something, you have to wander through town looking for the one shop whose owner and/or bodega cat decided to turn the lights on.

Luckily, we have a holiday just sitting around that nobody’s using: Presidents’ Day is the third Monday in February. Presidents’ Day is an odd holiday because, unlike most special days on the calendar, it serves no constituency. Italian heritage groups really care about Columbus Day, and Labor Day is important to old school union types, who are not the sort of folks you want to piss off. Who would care if we lost Presidents’ Day? Jimmy Carter? I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Fuck Jimmy Carter. He should be content with the fact that September 13 is National Peanut Day; I’m tired of the entire nation bending to the tyrannical whims of our most authoritarian president, Generalissimo Jimmy Carter.

Also: Don’t tell me where to set my thermostat.

The one person who might have a legitimate gripe is George Washington. Presidents’ Day used to celebrate his birthday, which is February 22. But eventually, the Great Emancipator/attention whore Abe Lincoln — whose birthday is February 12 — began to infringe on Washington’s big day. In 1971, Congress moved the holiday to the third Monday in February, so the 15th through 21st, which hits neither Washington nor Lincoln’s birthday, which is impressively stupid even for Congress. Worse still, the day now also celebrates our generic, seat-warmer presidents, so in addition to recognizing Washington for defeating the British and Lincoln for ending slavery, we also celebrate John Tyler for…what, keeping a chair in the Oval Office from flying away with his bony Whig ass for four years? I guess so, though in fairness, that’s still more than William Henry “I Died In 30 Days” Harrison did.

Nobody cares about Presidents’ Day or celebrates it. Nobody sings carols about Franklin Pierce, nobody puts a big, inflatable James K. Polk in their yard. Presidents’ Day has been moved before, we could move it again; we just need to move it from the third Monday in February to the second Monday. The new day would cover Lincoln’s birthday for the first time, and also William Henry Harrison’s, in case you want to lay in bed with pneumonia to commemorate his presidency.

For the record: This is not a “cancel George Washington” thing. I’m aware that George Washington, like every human being born before 1995, is highly problematic. But I think that a person’s good acts should be weighed against their bad in the context of their time, and George Washington established the peaceful transfer of presidential power, which is an extremely important norm that had an impressive 224 year run. Even if Presidents’ Day changes, we still celebrate Washington plenty; he’s on the dollar, one of our nation’s most prestigious safety schools is named after him, and there’s a monument to his big, stone penis in the middle of the capitol. He’ll be fine.

If people still want to call the day “Presidents’ Day”, then that works for me. I see no reason why we can’t have a day nominally for presidents that we celebrate by sleeping off hangovers; that would actually be a perfect commemoration of Andrew Johnson’s presidency. It’s not like the day is currently marked by sacred rituals; it’s marked by mattress sales and Toyotathons. And the fact that the new day would sometimes overlap with Valentine’s Day is, I think, a feature, not a bug; Valentine's Day has a major design flaw, in that you're supposed to go out for a big, romantic dinner and then have sex when you’re both bloated and tired. The sex should be pushed back to the night before, when everyone’s good and drunk, so you can have celebratory sex if your team wins, or, better yet, angry sex if your team loses.

Of course, the NFL could also move the game back a week. Presidents' Day has only been drawn into the Super Bowl's orbit because the NFL added a 17th game this year, which delayed the Super Bowl by a week. The first 35 Super Bowls were played in January, but it moved to the first week of February starting in 2002, and now it’s the second week. The NFL could move the game back another week still, but I think there’s a simple reason why they won't: money. My extensive research shows that the NFL likes money. It’s why they’ll never play the game on Saturday, and if playing the game the second week of February and forcing you to go to work with a volcanic hangover is the profit-maximizing strategy, then that’s what they’re going to do.

Which leaves Congress. Some opponents of a Super Bowl Monday holiday are adamant that this is the NFL’s problem; their argument boils down to “why should Congress have to do this?” I see things differently; to me, the situation isn’t that Congress has to do this, it’s that Congress gets to do this. I support a party (the blue one) that has a major image problem. We’re seen as effete, out-of-touch eggheads with utter disdain for all things American. Over-privileged, over-educated snowflakes who think the world owes us the same level of safety and comfort that we enjoyed in the womb. Puritanical, dowdy killjoys with a stick so far up our asses that we can taste pine in the back of our mouths. Snotty, spoiled theatre kids whose cheap, performative progressivism has all the appeal of a popsicle made of dog spit. And I’d like to say “that’s completely false”, but…it’s not completely false, is it?

President Diamond Joe Biden has enough of a regular-guy image that he could sign the bill without it seeming like pandering. For other Democrats, it could be a simple, tangible way to make people’s lives a bit better. I don’t want to pretend that moving Presidents’ Day would be a political magic bullet, but I’m always looking for ways to separate the Democratic brand from the roving hoards of overly online twerps. And this strikes me as good politics.

Societal interests change, societal values change. 150 years ago, we lionized leaders and generals, which is why most monuments from that era are literally men on horseback. In that same era, we decided to honor our presidents with a national day of celebration, even though we already paid them good money even if they were terrible. Today, the Super Bowl is an organically occurring holiday that’s one of the most fun days on the calendar. It shouldn’t be followed by one of the least fun days, in which we force people to sit pointlessly in a chair, John Tyler-style, nursing the Super Bowl of hangovers. People will not work today — they might be at work, but they won’t work. Let’s make the holiday official.