Happy Martin's Day

Well, it's Martin's Day again, and time for me to have my annual Martin's Day rant.

Has it ever occurred to you that there are only four holidays in these our United States that are dedicated to one person only? Even more, three of these four holidays are in honor of gentlemen who were not even Americans: Chris Columbus was Italian, and Jesus Christ (who has two of those four holidays) was (is?) either Israeli or Kingdom-of-Heavenese.

And the third person to have his very own holiday is, of course, the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Junior. Call him Martin, for short. Makes things easier.

The tone thus far should have alerted you to the fact that I think giving Martin his very own day is somewhere between a mistake and a farce. After all, we have Founding Fathers that either have no holiday at all, or else have to share one with somebody else.

But, if we're dead set on giving a holiday to a single person, and not a dead President, I say that individual should be Nicolas Copernicus. And the reason why?

We all know Mr. Copernicus was the man responsible for proposing the heliocentric theory of the solar system. An important tenet of this theory is that the planets revolved about the Sun. What's more, the heliocentric theory caused quite a stir, an upset, the casting down of one school of thought to be replaced with another. One might even call it a revolution, and indeed they did, the etiology of the new meaning of the word derived from the revolution of the planets about the Sun.

And that's where we get the common term revolution, as in a political revolution. Prior to the time of Mr. Copernicus' big idea, the best term for a political revolution we had was the French coup d'etat.

Therefore, if not for Copernicus' being such a bright fellow, there would never have been an American Revolution. There would have been an American Coup d'Etat, and we'd be referring to a sacred part of our national history using the language of those damned Frenchies.

Intolerable.

But hey, happy Martin's Day, everyone. Let's all keep the Spirit of Kwanzaa alive for another couple weeks.