Return to Sender: Happy Birthday Mister Founding Father

Dear Benjamin Franklin:

Happy belated birthday!

We here at Phillyist feel a special bond with you. And it’s not just because the city smacks of you, or because we see your impersonators everywhere, or even because of what our university affiliations may or may not be.

You see, Ben, it’s because of your cheekiness. We’re bloggers. We dig it. It sure took a cheeky bastard to say “Beer is living proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.” We know you and your buddies weren’t so happy drinking tea, but it took a special kind of brash to advocate beer over, say, coffee. The Beirut player hidden inside every Phillyist writer wants to shake your hand, Benjamin Franklin.

Not only were you cheeky, Ben, but sometimes you could be snarky. And if there’s one thing bloggers dig more than cheekiness, it’s snarkiness. You could insult with the best of us, Ben Franklin – but you made it sound far more eloquent than we ever do. How we wish that, when we hear of a selfish politician accepting bribes from a corrupt lobbyist, we could come up with a line like: “A man wrapped up in himself makes a very small bundle,” or that we could say: “Certainty? In this world nothing is certain but death and taxes” when a sportscaster announces he’s certain that this time the Eagles are going to go all the way. (While we’re on the subject, Ben – we were hoping that next season you might be able to cleverly insult the refs when they make bad calls, thus helping us live up to the sportscaster’s predictions.)

But we also feel connected to you, Ben, because every time we struggle with column ideas, we remember that you once advised: “Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing,” and we go out into the world and find our ideas through our experiences. “Return to Sender” is about experiencing Philadelphia, for better or for worse, and Phillyist is about sharing Philadelphia with others – so we like to think that not only are we doing things worth writing about, but that we’re writing things worth reading about. You’re also why we don’t censor ourselves in these writings: “If all printers were determined not to print anything till they were sure it would offend nobody, there would be very little printed.” We know our readers don’t like or agree with every word we write, but it exists in the blogosphere anyway. (On a side note, we really think that you would have liked blogs. They might have made your training as a printer obsolete, but the sheer egalitarianism of blogging would probably have appealed to you quite a bit.)

You once wrote: “I should have no objection to go over the same life from its beginning to the end: requesting only the advantage authors have, of correcting in a second edition the faults of the first.” But we’d like to think, Ben, that there weren’t any faults the first time around. (Except for, you know, the history of juvenile delinquency and the family in-fighting.) Maybe that’s why you never needed to come back. But rest assured: this special birthday letter will go through revision enough for all of us.

Congratulations on your three hundredth birthday – or, as we’ve taken to calling it, your Benniversary – and best wishes for three hundred more. We wouldn’t be here without you.

Image credit: The Franklin Institute