Right on the money

The coins of many countries have some sort of decoration or a motto around the rim. This descends from the days when coins had intrinsic worth and weren't mere tokens. The unscrupulous would shave the edges of gold and silver coins. When the latest series of "gold tone" Presidential Dollars was released however, the Religious Right, never known for superior cognitive function, raised holy hell and engorged their various web sites with rage and our in-boxes with viral e-mails excoriating the "liberals" for, as the ten Commandments command, taking God off the money or at least banishing him to the margins. Of course God isn't the name of God, but putting him on a dollar alongside a forbidden graven image is pretty close to taking his name (or names) in vain. Jesus made an issue of the inappropriateness of associating God with money and the money of his day had God written all over it.

Of course the motto wasn't taken off the money and it wasn't "hidden" as some of the more perspicacious idiots insisted, but these people are all about the cultivation and breeding of irrational anger and facts and reason are as carefully removed from their passionate fugues as weeds from a garden. What would irony aficionados like me do without that bottomless well of religious idiocy? I might have to stop writing and get a life.

God was on the money of England when we were a colony and on the Spanish Milled Dollar that was legal tender here at the time of the Revolution also asserted that the government and God were as one, or at least in cahoots. Our coins remained secular until the Civil War when it became politically advantageous to relate the Northern Cause to God's Cause even though God never said much about the evils of slavery. I will leave that to you to ponder over but isn't it ironic that it's mainly in the South where people want to continue that tradition while forgetting how it was used against them?

It's not that I give a damn about religious commandments. It doesn't bother me that so many hairy palmed and ignorant Fundies worship them like some mildewed stone idol and since I don't trust the government that issues the coins in the first place, I can just as easily mistrust the God of Coinage referred to on most, but not all, coins since 1864 and let them have their bone to gnaw.

So when Congress just had to take time off from our War to perpetuate all wars late last year; that war so dire that our birthright has to be sold in the name of security, to pass legislation making sure that God has to be there right next to the picture of the President on the coins we slip into the slots of Vegas or render unto those machines in the gas station mens room, I had to thank my god of irony for the gift.

Take that Jefferson! Take that Yahweh! Take that Jesus and all your Jewish, liberal, atheist, socialized medicine loving friends. You won't be turning over tables in our Republican temple.