Godding the Money

"In [This space for rent] We Trust"

by Bryan Zepp Jamieson
6/29/02
http://www.zeppscommentaries.com/Humor/godding.htm

Back during the civil war, some minister named Wilkenson convinced Samuel P. Chase that they ought to put a little prayer on the money. Chase was one of only a couple of men to serve in the Legislative, Executive AND Judicial branches of government, which the calculations I just scribbled on my mouse pad assure me means he was three times as dumb as your ordinary, garden-variety politician who only serves in one of the three branches.

Chase went to Lincoln, who was having a bad hair day. Lincoln wasn't at all sure the United States would defeat the breakaway states, his generals were drunks, his wife was a psycho, and he kept having morbid fantasies of his own death. He signed on to the idea.

Convincing Congress was even easier. There's nothing dumber than a frightened politician, and Congress can be spectacularly dumb, even on those rare occasions when they aren't frightened. Congress did what Congress does best, and passed a dumb law.

So they godded the currency, and the Union went on to win the civil war, even though the south had God plastered all over the place, too.

After the war, common sense reassured itself, and some people thought it was a tad disrespectful to either God or the money to conjoin the two like that.

But there's no silliness like religious silliness, and some years later, they came out with a gold coin that had lady liberty on it. Some very sharp-eyed wowsers examined the coins, and after determining that what they saw under the magnifying glass wasn't a ding or a flyspeck or a scratch, but a real, honest to gold woman's nipple, raised hell about immorality on the coinage.

A normal person might have peered through the magnifying glass and been happy to see the mint had been kind enough to stick three cents worth of 22K gold on lady liberty, but not the wowsers. They raised a stink.

Congress, frightened, considered the matter. Not only did England have far cooler pennies the size of dollars, but their virgin goddess had a shield and Drake's ship and cool stuff like that, and wasn't compromised by having tits sticking out all over the place. Not only that, but the back of the coin assured one and all in an abbreviated dead language that Victoria ruled by the grace of God. She was also "Et. Ind. Imp.," but Congress determined that not only could America not afford to invade India, but it wasn't worth the bother.

Having a tit gap in the coinage was bad enough. Having an India gap was slightly irritating. But having a God gap too was intolerable, so Congress regodded the coins, and had the mint cover up Lady Liberty's boob. All was right in the world.

Not only did the value of the currency stay stable forever after, but there was a sharp improvement in the morality of people who handled the new, regodded currency. Indeed, the more of the new improved god coins people had, the better their morals.

In fact, America went about twenty-five years without a single crime being committed. I'm holding one of those regodded coins in my hand as I tell you this (damned hard to type, though, let me put it back down) so you know it's true.

Regodded coins fixed us right up, which is why the dollar is worth 1/16th of an ounce of gold, and there is no crime, especially among the wealthy.

But there was a fly in the ointment. The coins were taken care of, but the FLAG was still godless. Oh, there was a little ritual to appease the flag god that the kids got to utter each morning. Back in the late 19th century, a socialist came up with the idea of convincing free Americans that they should profess fealty to the state each morning, and somehow managed to sell the idea. So he got all these products of Jefferson and Madison to stand and chant to the flag, and he doubtlessly smirked, thinking his evil statist plans to destroy American freedom had succeeded.

But Americans are nothing if not vigilant. Along about 1924, someone noticed that when the kids did their little twitch-and-chant each morning, it was to "our flag." Some of those kids were foreigners, and for all anyone knew, when they said "our flag," they might be thinking of fleur-de-lis, union jacks, or cool black Bavarian eagles on red backgrounds. So they nailed it down: "to the flag of the United States of America," and just in case there were any Indian kids (the Indians we did conquer, not the ones we didn't) who were entertaining any fool notions about Cherokee nations or any of that stuff, they tacked on "and to the Republic for which it stands."

Oddly enough, not a word about swearing by the Constitution, even though without the Constitution, America's just another chunk of real estate, not even a Republic.

In 1954, we were locked in a life and death struggle with a country that, we were told, had an economic system that was so inferior that it couldn't produce a decent tractor, car, or even electric toaster. Evidence suggested that this was indeed the case, but our fearless captains of industry assured us that the commie hordes were going to destroy us all immediately unless we immediately put ourselves under the care and guidance of those captains of industry.

Commies were godless, which was a relief to religious leaders who had to really strain to avoid noticing that Hitler derived most of his most murderous and vicious interests from his interpretation of the Catholic bible. Bible literalists can be a real moral burden when they're using the bible to justify slavery or mass murder or socialism. Fortunately, commies were atheists.

Russia had a pledge to their flag, one which doubtlessly included the words "red" and ‘workers" and probably babbled happily about tractor production for a half hour. But it didn't mention god.

"Aha!" said Congress, which in a bizarre twist of fate was a) Republican b) under a Republican president c) following an election they actually won honestly. "We can show those commies! Someone call God and tell Him to shag his ass here. We've got a job for Him!"

So they brought God in and hung Him out to dry on the pledge of allegiance to the flag. It worked out well, too: America never lost a declared war after that. There's a pretty good chance it would have contributed to a lower crime rate, but the coins had already taken care of that. Instead, school kids got smarter, more industrious, and stopped chewing gum or adopting strange fads.

All was right in the world. In fact, all was perfect.

But now we face an even greater danger. Saudi Arabia, our very bestest friend in the whole wide world, not only allows their priests to administer corporal punishment (Catholic priests everywhere will like that) and punish people for crimes like adultery and attempting to leave a burning building while dressed immodestly, but they have "There is no God but God" written right ON their flag. OK, it's in that squiggly stuff they use instead of English, and it isn't God but Allah, but obviously, we face yet another deity gap.

We can't have people saying that Osama bin Laden is more religious and moral than us because God signed his flag while all the American flag has is a bunch of red strips and stars and stuff like that.

So what we need to do is to replace all the stars with little crosses, and have something like the "Don't Tread On Me" snake, only instead of a snake, maybe it could be a picture of a really good Christian, like Charleton Heston, or Ann Coulter, or Betty Bowers, maybe pointing a gun at the viewer. And to get the support of the C&W boolya crowd, we could have the legend: "Mess with God, and he'll put a boot up your ass!"

After all, we don't want people thinking we're silly and pretentious, do we? But we want to be goddam sure they know we're more religious and more patriotic than anyone else!

So let's give our regods to Broadway, run this baby up the flagpole, and see who salutes!