A scholar of rare, historical documents is suing the Secretary of Treasury (bonus points if you can name the Secretary of the Treasury) to force the government to mint new coins commemorating the 10 men who served as "president" under the Articles of Confederation.
"They actually enacted treaties, laws, proclamations and resolutions as presidents of the United States," (Stanley L.) Klos says. It doesn't bother Klos that historians say he's off base and dismiss his claims as silly. As far as he's concerned, they have it all wrong, and he has the documents to prove it.
"If you go into the national archive, the first thing that greets you is the Treaty of Paris proclamation signed under the great seal of the United States of America by our president, Thomas Mifflin," Klos says. "It ended the war with Great Britain."
Actually, if you go to the National Archives the first thing that greets you is a metal detector, which also doesn't belong on a coin. And if we're going to plan our monetary system based on the "first thing that greets you" standard, our legal tender is going to feature mostly ill-tempered bouncers and maitre d's whose greatest joy is escorting you to the table right behind the kitchen door.
Klos' suit cites the "The Presidential Coin Act," a law Congress passed -- apparently while drunk -- that directs the Treasury secretary to issue $1 coins featuring the faces of all the Presidents. Klos believes that "all the Presidents" includes Presidents no one has ever heard of who served under a primitive legal document so weak that it barely existed at all.
However you may feel about Presidents like, say, Thomas McKean (who played Lenny on Laverne & Shirley, I think) the problem is that we already have too many coins. I, in particular, have too many coins. I keep my extra pennies in coffee cans next to the dresser in the bedroom and I'm about three dollars away from causing structural damage to my house. ("Honey, why is our bed in the basement?")
In my opinion, coins, like the magnetic fields of the Earth, are not something that's supposed to change. For most of my life, American money stayed dependably the same. Then they decided to start minting new coins.
The first time I got one of those bus token dollars in my change at the post office (post offices being the only place in the world that actually uses whatever new coin the mint comes up with) I threw it away because it freaked me out so much. So minting a bunch of new dollar coins with the faces of people like Cyrus Grffin or Elias Boudinot on them is not going to do my mental health a lot of good.
Just when I'm on the brink of throwing my hands up in disgust over the things you write (e.g., your excusing of Jeremiah "God Damn America" Wright's inexcusable racism and anti-Americanism; your support of Obama in spite of his lying, his anti-Americanism, and his cohort of racist friends; your calling Jesus a "radical socialist" (!)), you come up with something brilliant and hilarious like this.
Then I get my warm and fuzzy feelings for Tom, and want to read more.
(Hmm, maybe now that I've written this, Tom will stop writing about irrelevant-yet-highly-amusing topics, and stick to the relevant-and-highly-annoying topics of the day. I hope not; he has far too great a talent to waste on the merely practical.)
Posted by: Squidley | 05/12/2008 at 11:56 PM