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. |
Hmmm. Good question.
I think it's because I seldom meet a government employee who doesn't think they are significantly better than any mere citizen.
How big are 1/50th oz gold coins?
I don’t buy cigarettes, but groceries I get at the cutrate bag your own grocery store. I live in iowa.
If you’re paying more than 5 bucks for a gallon of milk, you need to shop somewhere else. Same for the gas.
I’ve paid just short of a C note filling up a pickup.
But you responded to the above post with this below:
Uh, a fiver does buy more than all that.
Now you state this below:
If you’re paying more than 5 bucks for a gallon of milk, you need to shop somewhere else. Same for the gas.
Which is it?
I think you missread something. The first line says “...a gallon of fuel, a gallon of milk, or a pack of cig...”
Notice the “or”. That means one of those things for 5 bucks. NOt all three for a total of 5 bucks.
And you stated this above.
What is the meaning of "all"?
Fine. I should’ve used “each”. But you already knew that.
I’ll drink to that!
No I didn’t know that. A mind reader I am not.
Are we talking new dollars or old dollars, here?
Thanks for the link. This is very important. I have posted the article below:
Look and Feel
The value of a coin or banknote depends on its familiarity
The Economist, April 3, 2008IF RATIONALITY reigned supreme in economics, travellers would spend their foreign cash based upon its value in the currency of their home country. All too often, however, they actually treat foreign banknotes as though they were Monopoly money. Given the unfamiliarity of other countries' currencies that is not, perhaps, surprising. But a piece of research about to be published in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review by Adam Alter and Daniel Oppenheimer, a pair of psychologists at Princeton University, shows that something similar is true even of familiar currencies, depending on the form they come in. In particular, Dr Alter and Dr Oppenheimer have demonstrated that the perceived value of a dollar changes with the form that dollar takes.
For the first part of their study Dr Alter and Dr Oppenheimer picked 37 “volunteers” at random from the university's canteen. They asked them to estimate how many simple objects—gumballs, paperclips and pencils—they could purchase with either a standard dollar bill or a Susan B. Anthony dollar coin that was presented to them. Susan B. Anthony dollars are legal tender but, having been produced only from 1979-81 and then again in 1999, they are rarely seen in circulation.
After the volunteers had made their estimates, they were asked to indicate on a scale of one to seven how familiar they were with either the banknote or the coin. Dr Alter and Dr Oppenheimer were not surprised to find that all participants were less familiar with the coin than with the banknote. Nor were they that surprised to find a difference in how the participants valued coin and note (the expectation that there would be a difference was, after all, the point of doing the experiment). They were, however, flabbergasted by the size of the difference. People offered the banknote believed, on average, that they could use it to buy 83 paperclips, 72 napkins or 46 sweets. Those offered the coin thought 39 paperclips, 51 napkins or 27 sweets. In other words, the note was believed to be almost twice as valuable as the coin.
To check this result was not caused by some prejudice in favour of paper money and against coinage, Dr Alter and Dr Oppenheimer repeated the experiment offering either two single dollar bills or a single two-dollar bill. Like dollar coins, two-dollar bills are rarely found in circulation. The second set of results was virtually the same as the first. And when the study was conducted a third time with a real dollar bill and a subtly doctored version that had had, among other things, George Washington's head reversed, the results were, again, nearly the same. People, it seems, literally value familiarity.
Whether this observation has wider significance is unclear, but it may. Familiarity takes time to build up. It may have been unfamiliarity with the currency itself, rather than with its face value, which caused price gouging (or, at least, allegations of price gouging) when the euro was introduced. With that in mind, it might be wise for America's Federal Reserve to watch retail prices carefully when it introduces a new series of banknotes in August. With money, it seems, it is not familiarity, but unfamiliarity that breeds contempt.
-- from The Economist
omg, Nully, Richard Poe answered you. His own self! RP, will you answer me?? I’m afraid I’m star struck, I love your articles.
I didn’t know you posted here. I’m in awe. Now I’m going to have to go look up all your posts here.
Eat your heart out!
tee hee hee
Hmmm ~ like IRS auditors?
Them too.
Pretty much all of our ‘betters’ have that attitude to one degree or another.
Our overlords are working on banning or excessively taxing that as well.
I feel like a lil kid. I had no idea RP posted here!
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