December 20 is Mudd Day: Why Daniel Day-Lewis is a Must-See Actor on This Unofficial Holiday

Never has it been more imperative to learn of the existence of the unofficial but nevertheless still relatively surprisingly celebrated day of observance known as Mudd Day than in 2012. If you are reading this after 2012, then you can be sure of two things. One, the Mayans were grossly mistaken, that’s what. And, two: you have the perfect opportunity to celebrate Mudd Day at home in a way that those reading this in 2012 cannot unless they enjoy watching low quality pirate copies of movies.

Mudd Day is December 20 because that is the day on which Dr. Samuel Mudd was born. Little could the proud parents of adorable baby Sammy have known in 1833 that a little over thirty years later he would be caught up in the kind of swirling, whirling paranoid fantasia of madness that seems peculiarly American in nature these days.

Mudd Day should be a day of commemoration for that distinctively American conceptualization of the Witch Hunt. It is with no lack of certainty that we can be sure the Witch Hunt did not begin here, but while it seems to have mostly disappeared from the European continent, the deafening thunder created by the pursuit of cloven hooves attired in finely sewn footwear continues unabated even to this day. Mudd Day should be celebrated to keep alive the specific lesson provided by the unreasonable imprisonment of the man whom history seems to have judged rightly of committing no more treasonous an act than fulfilling his Hippocratic Oath by setting the broken bone of John Wilkes Booth.

But Mudd Day should also be celebrated as a reminder of John Proctor, Sacco and Vanzetti, the Hollywood Ten, Steve Kurtz, Bradley Manning and all others who have been victimized by a rush to judgment borne of the premature Caesarian section of paranoid suspicions.

Helen Keller wrote that “doubt and mistrust are the mere panic of timid imagination, which the steadfast heart will conquer, and the large mind will transcend.” The kind of large mind capable of transcending timid imaginations in the best case and utter lack of an imagination in the worst case scenario is currently flickering in images almost as mammoth as the myth itself. Mudd Day on December 20, 2012 is the perfect day on which to head to the theater to see “Lincoln” and bask in the glory of the authentic reality that not every person who occupies the Oval Office is lacking the kind of steadfast heart capable of conquering doubt and mistrust.

Lincoln” not only is the most appropriate movie to enjoy as part of your celebration of Mudd Day (while tossing in another great Daniel Day-Lewis performance in “The Crucible” to cover both the Salem Witch Hunt and the communist Witch Hunt in one single sitting), it also helps prove that math is not the concrete discipline it seems. “Lincoln” irrefutably argues that the difference between 43 and 16 is much closer to infinity gap than it is to 27.