Washington, Washing-ton.

George Washington is usually cast as more of a super-hero than any normal politician that we are used to hearing about. In the minds of many children, he single-handedly won the revolutionary war, and was the driving force behind the formation of our United States.

Much of this is probably historical embellishment, pop culture, and plain revisionist history, but Mr Washington had to have done something right to gain all of the praise and trust that he did.

In that vein, his Farewell Address as he was leaving the White House carried many powerful undertones that are eerily relevant today, as we begin thinking about our next president. The full text of the document can be found on wikipedia, though it is somewhat difficult to read, as it is written in a style that is quite out of step with current English writing.

Enter XKCD.com, where the best comics on the web come from. Mr. Munroe has done us all a great service and translated the text of this document into plainclothes modern American English, and has added a bit of humor into the translation as well. Check out the updated version here, it is well worth the 10 minutes that it takes to read through the whole thing.

A few snippets that I found particularly notable:

"Getting in the way of the law for the sake of power plays similarly screws things up. Playing that game creates groups just looking out for themselves, turning crazy splinter groups into a powerful force. Let this get too bad and you’ll probably have the country tossed back and forth wildly as the various parties with their pet issues fight for power, rather than nice, consensual, unified government.

Parties are probably gonna look like they’re helping with one popular issue or another, so you’re gonna want support them, but I bet the guys in charge of them will just turn out to be power-hungry assholes who want to run everything."

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"Control goes back and forth between one party and another, and they just get more and more pissed, and we’ve seen that get really bad in the past. But it also leads to terrible, controlling government and general suckage. This gets the people more angry, they get behind one party leader or another, and that guy just takes that support and does whatever he wants, screwing up the country.

I’m not talking about anyone in particular here, but this isn’t necessarially too far off, and it’s always gonna be a threat, so keep an eye out."

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"I like you all. We’re friends. I’m not gonna hope that you’ll actually remember all this for long, but I can hope that every now and then people will look back on what I said and use it to calm down a crazy political party, remind us not to get tied up with other countries, or to try to expose phoney patriots. That’s the only payment I need — the hope that in return for my looking after you, you’ll look after yourselves."

Well spoken, Mr Washington.

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