Benjamin Franklin is the most significant of America’s Founding Fathers. During his stay in Paris as ambassador of sorts for the fledgling United States, he was the 18th century equivalent of a rock star, complete with female groupies throwing themselves at him. They clearly had superior taste to our own century, obsessed as it is with reality show nobodies and pop-music histrions who can’t sing for the life of them, but I digress. Franklin convinced the French public and king Louis XVI to financially support the US, bankrupting the kingdom and ultimately leading to the French Revolution. The revolutionary Assembly granted honorary citizenship to Franklin (along with others like Tom Paine and George Washington) and even a seat in the assembly itself.
My opinion of Franklin was lowered when I learned that he was the one who first proposed the abomination that is Daylight Saving Time. I only recently found out that An Economical Project was in fact a satire much like his notorious opus Fart Proudly, a point that seems to have been completely escaped the proponents of DST.
It could have been worse, I suppose. They could have adopted Swift’s A Modest Proposal instead.
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