Modern man likes to pretend that his thinking is wide-awake. But this wide-awake thinking has led us into the mazes of a nightmare in which the torture chambers are endlessly repeated in the mirrors of reason. When we emerge, perhaps we will realize that we have been dreaming with our eyes open, and that the dreams of reason are intolerable. And then, perhaps, we will begin to dream once more with our eyes closed.Why don't we put folks like this on money in the States? Maybe putting somebody's profile--along with a relatively innocuous quote--on a coin is a way of fixing that person, of making him static, irrelevant. That might explain why he'd be on a coin in Mexico (though I'm not certain it does), but it doesn't explain why we haven't made an Emerson dollar in the US.
Friday, August 11, 2006
This Guy's On the Money
Octavio Paz is on the 20 peso coin here in Mexico.
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7 comments:
Our government acknowledges only patriotic romanticism. Anyway, didn't Emerson used to hang out with homos and hermits? You'd face some opposition.
Whitman. That would be even cooler, although I do believe Franklin may have been a bit bi-curious.
Maybe even two bits bi-curious. Still, putting him on money has to have helped us forget a lot about him. What better way to nullify your difficultest thinkers than to make 'em legal tender. I see a Dewey Dime on the horizon . . .
Maybe a compromise we could push through would be to have a conventional Franklin as the "heads" side and Franklin in drag as "tails"? Whitman wore dresses, I think. But seriously, I agree, Whitman would be the ultimate. Maybe Congress could remove "Under God" from the pledge in the same bill.
As I understand it, intellectuals have a unique role in Mexican society, because for many decades they were the only ones who could safely criticize the government. As Mexico's press is given more latitude, the role of the intellectuals has diminished.
That explains why the U.S. doesn't think enough of its intellectuals to put them on our currency, with the sole exception of Franklin. Also, the people now depicted on our bills were chosen in 1928, a time when yahooism was ascendant in the U.S. to a degree not seen again for more than half a century.
Unfortunately, the role of the public intellectual in Mexico is now diminishing, and they are being replaced by Mexican versions of Bill O'Reilly. Soon, Octavio Paz will seem as out of place on the 20 peso coin as Toni Morrison would seem on the $20 bill.
One last note: it would take a change in the law to depict Toni Morrison, but not Emerson or Whitman. And Franklin, J. Edgar Hoover, or any other deceased person could be depicted in drag at the whim of the treasury secretary, at least until a law specifically forbidding such heresy was passed.
I like the Franklin heads/tails combo. Very cool. But, of course, multisexuals would soon be asking for 3-D money.
Nice comment, Gordo. Thanks. That's the other side of the coin (hahahahaha) to how I usually view American anti-intellectualism. And it's helpful. Intellectuals can function as authority figures - crucial without a free press. On the other hand, our so-called journalists now function as authority figures. MT might disagree, but I find this more frightening.
I agree about the so-called journalists. If you were to say the same thing about journalists or "reporters," which I prefer when referring to the real deal, well thems would be fighting words. Columnists like Friedman and TV news anchors like Dan Rather and pundits like O'Reilly are not reporters. Friedman and O'Reilly explicitly offer "opinion." Rather reads aloud what others write and research. A reporter is somebody like Jack Kelley or Judith Miller. I mean before they were both fired. O.K., bad example, but they were fired. Rather was fired for telling the truth. O'Reilly is retained for lies and slander. Friedman enjoys his columnist position in large part, I suspect, because of the popularity of his books and probably because he argues aggressively from the facts as he reasonably construes them, which constitutes due diligence for opinion and sells newspapers.
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