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. |
If America is no longer able to control its internal currency you got bigger problems than whether or not it was "fiat" money.
Gold will then be stolen from the dead bodies of those who thought it would serve as a hedge against tough times.
Oh, I see. The government is required to spend money to protect the “unwary” from their own ignorance and ruin our money in the process.
Makes sense...not!
I am very much in favor of security features in money that keep the unwary and children from passing around bad paper.
I'd prefer they print it in bright red and orange though ~
Well, your groceries cost more than mine. I just looked through my junk mail advertizments to check for sure. A gallon of chololat whole milk is going for 2.99/gallon. So a gallon of skim milk, no chocolate, should go for quite a bit less than that.
You’re right about the OJ though. I don’t buy milk or juice. But $3.79/gal for OJ is not very appealing.
A can of pop. But who buys only one gallon of gas? A tankfull will spare you 20 bucks.
Actually, you've hit the nail on the head. If the motivation for these redesigns is innocent, then the topic is trivial and hardly worth discussing. The reason I wrote this column is that I do not believe the motives are innocent.
Consider the fate of the Dutch guilder. First, they devalued the guilder in people's minds by making it look like play money. Then they removed the face of Admiral de Ruyter, a Dutch national hero. Note that currency designer Ootje Oxenaar called Admiral de Ruyter a "war criminal".
The final step in this process was the complete elimination of the Dutch guilder and its replacement by the Euro.
If the dollar redesign follows the same course, then the next step will be removing George Washington and other Founding Fathers from our bills and replacing them with various heroes and heroines of the left. Next, the dollar will be eliminated altogether and replaced with the Amero or some other such transnational currency.
If my suspicion is true, the purpose of these redesigns is to devalue the dollar in people's minds, so we will feel no sense of loss or outrage when it is finally eliminated.
Sorry, it goes into a pot by the front door. Buys a six-pack of Nevada Pale Ale every couple weeks. But I’d be happy to share a bottle of ale with you!
Dunno. Grape juice is clear, until you let it soak up color from the peels...
California’s a long way off ... So I’ll pass on the brew ... I’ll hoist a Dominion Stout in your honour, though.
Yep, colorizing your paper money is a guaranteed prelude to going "Euro".
THIS color isn't bad:
Don’t be difficult!!!!!!!
;D
I see nothing ...
New tagline...
I've broken $50.00 filling up my mid sized sedan on several occasions lately.
Then it's failing in my case.
I find the newest series of notes visually interesting and esthetically pleasing. (OTOH, I quite literally put them under a microscope!).
Although I disagree that "the purpose of these redesigns is to devalue the dollar in people's minds", I agree that "we will feel no sense of loss or outrage when it is finally eliminated".
It's more subtle that making us not like the look of our money. It's to get us used to money frequently changing. After all, all three of the so-called Amero countries already use the same symbol -$- for their money. People will passively accept the new North American Dollar (or NAD) because it isn't all that much different than the last half a dozen changes to our bank notes.
The ones with the 'nads are ready to shove them down our throats at any excuse...
I’d be willing to drink the ale on your behalf...
How???
That makes sense. But while they are inoculating us to frequent design changes, they must also get us used to unwelcome changes, that is, changes in the direction of postmodernist kitsch, as exemplified by the Euro.
Like you, I rather liked the design changes which were done from 1996 through 2007. However, the appearance this year of the purple "5" makes clear that much more radical changes lie ahead.
A government committee.
It's a wonder that looking at them doesn't make us want to instantly puke...
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