Okay…remember money? If you’re a ‘boomer’ you do. If you’re not, you still suffer from embarrassing cultural delusions whether you want to admit it or not—which is what we 'boomers' did and is where you came from, so get over it!
Either way, grab your wallet and pull out a dollar bill. Lay it on the counter and take a good look at that sly guy glancing back at you. Is that not the condescending smirk of America's mythical version of Zeus? The all-knowing, paternal metaphor for financial security? The chiseled face of money, the only path forward for what has been considered possible on this continent since that "filthy little atheist", Thomas Paine (whose face isn't on anybody's money), outlined the democratic underpinnings of the American Revolution?
We live in an age when high-quality pictures and videos are readily available at the snap of an iPhone, and, as is typical with our species, we haven't been very thoughtful about it. In fact I think this ever-devolving fascination of ours with the visual image has all but killed off whatever remnants of organic perspective on the natural world we managed to drag into the 21st Century after 50 years of the mass-hypnosis experiment conducted by television producers whose credentials on mental health or ethical-hypnosis techniques were always known to be sketchy at best.
There comes a time, though, in most cultures at least, when its hubris outweighs its paradigms, and it needs to examine and re-arrange itself in order to survive. In the old days, before climate chaos, it was fine if this didn't happen. The composting culture just went extinct and a new one took its place. But this time the slow-motion arc of human evolution isn't an option anymore because...well...it's slow, and we've finally proved ourselves too stupid to manage our own destruction with enough aplomb to allow another culture to rise from our ashes. These are the times of not only climate chaos (which IMO includes the Covid debacle) but of nuclear-tipped oligarchs either warring with each other or propping each other up over resources, which is just another way of saying "money", and I think we've finally arrived. This is the point in our evolution as a species when no cultural icon is too trivial to snark at. Fair warning, but it beats feeling stupid.
So, keeping these admittedly-arbitrary guardrails in mind, check this out:
This was the stoic fountain from which all those billions (and billions) of dollar bills sprang. It's Gilbert Stuart's 1796 portrait that Martha, who liked a previous portrait Stuart did of George, commissioned him to do for her so she could have one of her own. Stuart, however, didn't want to give up what became his best prototype (and moneymaker) to the First Lady so he never finished it, and kept it around to crank out future founding images with. Follow this story to its logical end and it's hard not to conclude that Stuart took Martha's money (which didn't include faces of George yet but whose Custis "dowry" included over 100 slaves who, along with their descendants, were never freed until the Emancipation Proclamation) but failed to deliver, placing him at a watershed moment in our country's history of canonizing cheats who can afford to get away with cheating, but never mind. No matter his intentions, his mythic image endures. Three years previous, though, in 1793, portrait artist Edward Savage had George looking like this:
Two years goes by, and in 1795 another American portraitist, Rembrandt Peale, gives us this one:
Seeing a pattern yet? If you're noticing that George's image was undergoing the same transformation our movie stars' images do today, of getting younger as they became more iconic, then you're seeing what I did when I accidentally stumbled on these portraits while walking through the American Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C.
I've been in D.C. since the beginning of the 2021-22 school year (more or less) accompanying my daughter who is going to high school on the campus of the first--and still foremost--deaf university in the world. Ironically, Gallaudet University was chartered by another American icon, Abraham Lincoln, who, coincidentally, did not get younger as his star rose. Maybe that's because Lincoln, like Tom Paine who also didn't get any iconic makeovers, actually believed in democracy, or at least his era's version of it, and acted accordingly, unlike a lot of old-time slaveholders and modern (mostly Republican) Montana politicians. In other words, I've been in D.C. most of the year instead of my beloved Montana because our once-healthy politics has been captured, hogtied and tortured by our inimical social warriors, like Montana's current Superintendent of Public Schools, Elsie Arntzen, who can't possibly give special needs kids what they need to have a decent adolescent experience because they believe Jesus was white. Really. No kiddin'.
So again, full disclosure. I'm a "boomer", as is Elzie Arntzen which, if that ridiculous insult to the future of Social Security means anything at all, means that I was:
A. Sitting at the Round Table in the school library when my 5th Grade teacher came into the room crying, informing us that President Kennedy had been shot and that school was out for the rest of the day and:
B. I was raised to believe that George Washington had false teeth made of wood and that his stern tight lips were necessary to keep them from falling out, which all of these portraits, I believe, faithfully represent. He could not tell a lie because he had to hold his teeth in. Ask any 5th grade teacher (which Elzie was in her previous life), or 18th Century portrait artist.
None of this is not to disparage false teeth, wood or 5th Grade school teachers, God forbid. All have their issues and uses. But there comes a time, maybe in these times of oligarchs and their Final Wars of Choice over money, to point out this tiny yet obvious flaw in our linear thinking that forever leads us into such debacles. Ready?
The face of money is as absolute at myths, oligarchs and 5th Grade school teachers.
You’re welcome, and remember, you heard it here first.
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