Posted on 04/02/2008 7:42:28 PM PDT by Richard Poe
| by Richard Lawrence Poe Wednesday, April 2, 2008 |
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HAVE YOU seen the new five-dollar bill? It looks like someone spilled grape juice on it. A violet stain obscures Abraham Lincoln's face. On the back, an oversized numeral five appears in purple. Enough is enough. We must stop the desecration of our currency.
The U.S. Treasury's Bureau of Engraving and Printing claims it is making our banknotes "safer, smarter and more secure". They say the violet stain on Lincoln's face adds "complexity", rendering counterfeiting more difficult. The big purple five on the back supposedly helps vision-impaired people count their change.
Hogwash! These goals could be achieved through less drastic means. There is no need to turn our banknotes into Monopoly money.
U.S. currency already features watermarks, microprinting, embedded fluorescent security threads, color-shifting ink and fine-line printing patterns -- subtle security measures requiring little change in the dollar's design. For the visually impaired, high-contrast features could be added in a tasteful manner, without resorting to garish, phosphorescent hues.
The fact is, we are being hoodwinked. The redesign of our currency has nothing to do with fighting counterfeiters or helping people with weak eyesight. It has everything to do with catering to the perverse canons of postmodernist art. The U.S. Treasury has allowed a cabal of avant-garde designers to pull off one of the most audacious practical jokes in art history; the "subversion" and "deconstruction" of the U.S. dollar. We the taxpayers must demand an end to this cultural vandalism.
More than 2,300 years ago, Aristotle opined that art should be wondrous and beautiful. It should instruct and elevate the masses, he said, giving pleasure and catharsis or emotional release.
Today's hipster intellectuals reject Aristotle. Instead, they embrace a philosophy called "poststructuralism", "postmodernism" or just plain PoMo. For PoMo's apostles, art is a weapon of revolution. Its purpose is to mock, degrade and undermine the cherished beliefs of Western civilization. PoMo theorists call this process "deconstruction" or "subversion".
Photographer Andres Serrano famously deconstructed Christianity in 1989 by snapping a picture of a crucifix submerged in Serrano's own urine. In 1999, the Brooklyn Museum showcased an image of the Virgin Mary which artist Chris Ofili had splattered with elephant dung.
Meanwhile PoMo designers have been doing to national currencies what Serrano and Ofili did to Christianity. Their first target was the Dutch guilder.
From 1964 to 1985, graphic artist Ootje Oxenaar redesigned the entire series of Dutch guilder notes on commission from the Nederlandsche Bank. Oxenaar began the project by studying banknotes from many countries. He found them all "very muddy in color". Oxenaar later told the PBS series Nova:
"The only banknotes that really inspired me, in fact, was play money, like the Monopoly money, and that is what I think is necessary for banknotes too."Accordingly, Oxenaar designed the new guilders to look like play money. He sprang other tricks on the Dutch taxpayer as well. Oxenaar told a British design magazine:
"On the 1000 guilder note, it became a sport for me to put things in the notes that nobody wanted there. I was very proud to have my fingerprint in this note - and it's my middle finger!"The 100-guilder note formerly portrayed Admiral Michiel de Ruyter, a Dutch national hero who defeated French and British fleets in the 17th century. Oxenaar replaced Admiral de Ruyter with an image of a long-billed wading bird common in the Netherlands. "I changed our war criminal -- the grand admiral -- to a snipe", he later quipped.
Oxenaar's radical approach met resistance at first. But over time, he recalls, "there developed a circle of friends who believed in it... a circle of believers." Our new five-dollar bill suggests that some U.S. Treasury designers may have joined Oxenaar's circle.
For 67 years, no major design changes affronted the dollar's dignity. Then the transformation began. The $100 bill was redesigned in 1996; the $50 in 1997 and 2004; the $20 in 1998 and 2003; the $10 in 2000 and 2006; and the $5 in 2000 and 2008. With each mutation, our magnificent greenbacks have been devolving, by slow but steady increments, into play money.
The $100 bill is now undergoing its second redesign in 12 years. U.S. Treasurer Anna Escobedo Cabral recently told a group of grade-school students, "The bill is still a secret, and I can't tell you what it looks like. It will be very colorful, though!"
Since we taxpayers are footing the bill, secrecy seems inappropriate. The U.S. Treasury needs to tell us now where these redesigns are heading.
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Richard Lawrence Poe is a contributing editor to Newsmax, an award-winning journalist and a New York Times bestselling author. His latest book is The Shadow Party: How George Soros, Hillary Clinton and Sixties Radicals Siezed Control of the Democratic Party, co-written with David Horowitz. |
Your currency sounds like a bowl of "Lucky Charms" cereal!
;-)
I really think there are more important things to be concerned with. Pretty trivial.
Look at some of the moneys around the world, this stuff is tame and conservative.
$4.50 in Albuquerque, $7.00 in Chicago, $9.00 in New York, and I do care.
What can you buy with your $0.80 change after buying a gallon of gas?
I find it a bit ironic that a product from Florida USA that doesn't require refining is more expensive than a product the raw material for which must be shipped half way around the world before they can even begin turning it into a useful product.
Aren't you glad that those "undocumented migrant workers" are keeping the cost of it down? /SARC
I’m working on a solution to this embarrassment for America.
Until my project is complete, please simply send all of your $5 bills to me, postage paid, at:
1234 Georgetown Lane,
Georgetown, Cayman Is.
Not to be a hack, but keep in mind the world isn’t drilling, nor can it, for orange juice to keep money moving.
In any case I said nothing about "copiers" ~ just printers.
Looks good to me.
Maybe they are testing new printing techniques on the $5 bill that might go into the next redesign of the $100 bill.
“You can buy two gallons of milk for 5 bucks.”
Where? Milk is over $5 a gallon in these parts.
A day late? How so?
I don't want to come off like a Ron Paul or Dennis Kucinich nutbag, but maybe their idea (the big three) planned this economy collapse we are in right now. The "new" Amero, along with the merged economies (Canada/US and Mexico) will be touted as the only way to stabilize the individual countries economy this way (i.e. the EU).
The Amero may have to be a 3 sided coin to appease all 3 countries with their slogans and images.
Disclaimer: most of this was meant to get a laugh, but taken with it a grain of sea salt.
Why do people still use cash?
Debit cards and credit cards, folks.
Almost all banks cover all illegal charges if you report in a timely manner.
Instant, crystal clear records on your computer.
Almost no risk for robbery, except from a few morons like the Homocide Twins in Chapel Hill who posed for ATM photos.
"That's an explosive mixture. It risks a kind of inflation that would trigger panic buying, hoarding and fears of mass political protest. Actually, this is already happening in Asia."
Good Lord! $9 for a pack of cigarettes??? I’m glad I don’t smoke! People must have to work an extra job just to be able to afford to continue smoking. I remember as a teenager being sent down to the store on the corner by my parents and paying less than a couple dollars for a pack!
(Organic milk is $6 a gallon here in Washington state, gas is about $3.40/gl.)
The first pack I bought was $0.25 from a vending machine and there was a new penny inside the celophane wrapper.
Oddly enough the profit margins per pack to "big tobacco" has remained roughly the same, with various governments extracting and accounting for the difference.
BTW, if you attempted to buy cigarettes these days as a teenager, you would be arrested and your parental units would be fined.
Yes. It does. You must REALLY not look at money.
Ho hum. We have fiat money. Eventually, its face value will equal its value as paper, and you can afford to burn it for heat.
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