Eleanor Roosevelt, Harriet Tubman,Susan B. Anthony -- you'd be OK. Not so fast on Ida McKinley, or Grace Coolidge or Carrie Nation. No Elizabeth Seton, either; you can be good enough to be a saint, but you were far, far too Christian for this administration. Maybe not Eleanor Roosevelt, either; Andrew Jackson is, well, prettier. How about Bruce Jenner?
Of course, Andrew Jackson was not kind to Indians ... excuse me, Native Americans. I mean, he adopted one as his son, so it couldn't have been racist or personal, but he did fight them, and that in today's ultra-PC world causes his presence on the $20 bill to be problematic.
Al Sharpton, for example, finds the Jackson 20 so prejudicial that he's holding off on paying his taxes until he can pay them in bills that have someone else on them like, maybe, Snoop Dogg.
Obviously you see the problem. Had there been a female president with a stellar track record, or a great utero-American leader of the past, we would have already done something like that and put her on a bill. Which should be the way it goes. Earn your stripes first, and maybe then you can be put on a bill. Of course, by law you have to die in the middle of all that, which thins out the herd even more.
And being the first woman to do X or Y doesn't count, either. Being first clearly doesn't equate to being good. Just look at the first black president,
I'm not even sure why this is a topic, this $20 bill thing. Here we are, with a few folks worried about whose face is on the 20, and who seem not to care at all that we owe nearly one trillion of those $20 bills, many of them to people who like, or tolerate, us like the Canadians, but most of which are owed to our sworn enemies like the Chinese, the Russians, and a few other countries worth of people who make me uncomfortable to be in their debt.
So here's my thought. Let us keep good old Andrew Jackson, general and president, the hero of New Orleans, right where he is on the $20 bill for the time being. The next woman -- shoot, how about the next anybody -- whose efforts lead directly to the elimination of the national debt, can be ensconced for the indefinite future where General Andy's stylish mane is now located.
If we're going to talk about faces on money, how about we talk about the faces of people who actually remember that it belongs to the taxpayers, and honor someone who puts it back there by getting rid of our debt.
Do that, and I won't even care if Al Sharpton pays his taxes.
Copyright 2015 by Robert Sutton
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Rasmussen on March 17 even published a poll of this (http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/lifestyle/general_lifestyle/march_2015/eleanor_roosevelt_tops_hillary_for_the_face_on_the_20_bill), finding that Eleanor Roosevelt was preferred to now-candidate Hillary Clinton. Forget how inappropriate it would be to put a candidate's name on the money, let alone that she is (apparently) still alive, which disqualifies her. The only currency she should be on is the $3 bill.
ReplyDeleteWe could always use someone who is famous, dead, and almost gender neutral. We wouldn't even have to change the last name. I refer, of course, to Michael Jackson.