Zoo Station

Okay, make that belated birthday, since it was Ben Franklin's birthday yesterday. Of all the founding fathers, Ben Franklin is my overwhelming favourite because he embodies everything I consider awesome in a human being. He was unabashedly curious about everything, was an outstanding inventor, an exquisite wit, unbelievably visionary, founded the first lending library in the U.S., was an internationalist and a merry rogue. And remember, he was born not to privilege, but in poverty, and in some sense, embodies the American ideal that anyone with merit can make it to the top. On the occasion of his birthday, both the New York Times and the Washington Post carried tributes to the man. Since, the Times is behind a wall, I'll excerpt a bit from Stacy Schiff's piece.

His curiosity was matched by the suppleness of his mind, one singularly free of hobgoblins. (His ability to argue either side of an issue with equal vigor drove Adams to distraction.) Nor was there anything orthodox or evangelical about Franklin, who took his Puritanism as he took his Enlightenment ideals: with a splash of water, hold the doctrine. His religion was tolerance, his sect pragmatism.

When did he become so plushly, so comfortably, so voluptuously American? As the features are not aquiline, so the morals are far from impeccable. With equal genius Franklin codified good behavior and defied it. He was an organization man who was not particularly organized, a committee man who worked most effectively through back channels. With equal gusto he preached temperance and wrote drinking songs. He practiced frugality only, he admitted, so long as it was absolutely necessary. Diligence was his middle name, but few have made dilatoriness sound so attractive. A great deal of his famed industry consisted of getting someone else to whitewash the fence.
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His role as a public servant was difficult to grasp, long submerged, at times unwelcome. His last public act was to petition Congress against slavery. Weeks before his death he reminded his colleagues that liberty should extend "without distinction of color to all descriptions of people." No one believed so deeply in an unfettered society, in free ideas as fervently as in free markets. Franklin managed to cast a vote for both, opting not to patent his inventions. It was preferable they be available to all.

If you'd like to read more about this outstanding man, a good place to start would be his autobiography (one of the best ever) or Walter Isaacson's excellent biography of the man who is now regarded as the first great American.