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When: 2014
What: The Eurotrash revamping of our hard-won dollars
WTF: I don’t know about you guys, but I’m proud to be an American. So proud that I should sue whoever sings that song, because he clearly plagiarized my unspoken thoughts. And I’m proud to carry around a paper currency that affords no way for blind people to tell what denomination they’re holding. A currency so drably monochromatic that I can accidentally pay $20 for a $1 iced tea and not even notice. A currency that can inflate like a mylar balloon sucking on a helium hose. But if the treasonous rabble at the Dollar Redesign Project have their say, we may be stuck with bills both modern and practical.
Why you should start hoarding money right now: Well, the recession. Also, that $1 portrait of George Washington is going to be a collector’s item one day. Just as your weird uncle once bequeathed you a rare $2 bill sometime in your childhood, so shall you pass down an obsolete federal reserve note to a young niece or nephew who promises to keep it forever but then breaks down the next day and buys candy with it. At least you’ll have the chance to tell them that once upon a time, the U.S. didn’t have to dress its dollars up in socialist, welfare-state day-glo stripes, and used to put normal things on the back, like a pyramid with an eye. ”Why?” your little niece or nephew will ask. Because, you will answer, this country used to be run by a cult, and it should’ve stayed that way.
Prediction: The expression becomes: “queer as any one of our dollar bills.”
