Lessons, In Futility

THE DISMAL SCIENCE DEPT./
ALEXANDER HAMILTON DIV.

I recently got a letter from the IRS telling me that, contrary to all the news I’d heard, I might indeed be eligible for “the stimulus.” But I had to apply, and I only had until October 15 — now extended to Nov. 21 (guess why).

Gosh, I sure could use some of that there stimulus… my computer is so damn old, it would be great to have a new one… But I’m one of the undeserving poor, aren’t I? So why were they telling me I was deserving? Maybe it isn’t Onyourownavirus, after all. Maybe I have the same right as everybody. Finally I screwed my courage to the sticking place, and applied for what everybody else got free.

The story turned into a fine illustration of the evils of debt-based money. I share it to show how the system goes out of its way, intentionally and capriciously, to lock in class structures and lock in the failure of the poor. Click, abandon hope, and…enter.

The warning may be just a Google-not-talking-to-Apple thing, a formality, exacerbated by my old hardware. I think, I could access a safe modern browser at the public library…but — oh yeah, that resource isn’t there any more for the tech-less. A safety warning is a discouraging hassle, and I begin to calculate my opportunity cost in going forward.

Opportunity Cost (econ.) the cost of an investment (money, resources, time, etc.) in terms of its best alternative use. [Fr. opporun — Latin ob-, before portus, a harbor.]
— Chambers English Dictionary

Here the opportunity cost in clicking ahead seems low, but there’s a deeper economic law than “time is money,” specifically when it comes to red tape:

The Aborrence of Futility: Economist Thorstein Veblen perceived humans have an abhorrence of futility. That is, we instinctively avoid toxic life-sucking swindling bullshit that wastes time, wastes resources, insults you, addles your brain, wears you out, and leads to increased alienation.

So the opportunity cost just rose quite a bit, for the task seemed more likely to be futile. But ah, that new computer… “Be an optimist for once. Nothing ventured nothing gained. I may already be a winner!”

Hmm??. Oh, I can’t use the number sign. #$%!

That propensity for purposeful activity, and that repugnance to all futility of effort, which belong to man by virtue of his character as an agent, do not desert him when he emerges from the naive communal culture where the dominant note of life is the unanalysed and undifferentiated solidarity of the individual with the group with which his life is bound up. When he enters upon the predatory stage, where self-seeking in the narrower sense becomes the dominant note, this propensity goes with him still, as the pervasive trait that shapes his scheme of life. The propensity for achievement and the repugnance to futility remain the underlying economic motive. The propensity changes only in the form of its expression and in the proximate objects to which it directs the man’s activity. Under the regime of individual ownership the most available means of visibly achieving a purpose is that afforded by the acquisition and accumulation of goods; and as the self-regarding antithesis between man and man reaches fuller consciousness, the propensity for achievement — the instinct of workmanship — tends more and more to shape itself into a straining to excel others in pecuniary achievement. Relative success, tested by an invidious pecuniary comparison with other men, becomes the conventional end of action. The currently accepted legitimate end of effort becomes the achievement of a favorable comparison with other men; and therefore the repugnance to futility to a good extent coalesces with the incentive of emulation.
Thorstein Veblen, The Theory Of The Leisure Class, 1899

Hunt through old books of scrawled passwords. None of the old work. So I apply to get a new one.

Dumfounert, it took me a while to realize what they were saying. They weren’t beaming 1,200 digital zeroes and ones into my bank account, because the IRS can’t verify my information without an “outside credit card.” As if I were signing up for a ski condo. As if the IRS itself, which has all my information, weren’t able to certify my identity more reliably than any new bank. The ruse is, the claim that my bank is not a competent enough judge of my identity, for me to get stimulus. The logic is, that only people already in debt get any credit. And that’s the American System, to a T-bill.

The scales fall from my eyes. I get “stimulus” only if I sign up for a new credit card, or buy a house or boat, or take out a car loan. They want me to go irresponsibly on the hook for money I know I can’t repay. Here I thought I was being prudent, cutting up my credit cards years ago.

From here, all clicks lead to the “egress.”

Remember everyone who gets this letter is unemployed or unbanked. On these criteria alone, any credit card we’re likely to get carries a 30% interest rate.

Usury: 1) the iniquitous taking of interest on a loan. 2) Faithless lending at rates past borrowers’ reasonable means to repay, in order to force failure; often, to dispossess them of their surety. 3) Front-loading a borrower with debt with easy short terms, that will balloon quickly and force default. 4) Lending to individual borrowers at any rate that, if general, would guarantee the over-leveraging of the system. 5) Lending at any rate past a system’s natural limit of sustainable growth; estimated at approximately 3%.
— Chambers English Dictionary, definition 1. The others, VVV

Why would they encourage poor people to binge on risky credit for the sake of an upfront cash rebate? Don’t they care that they’re setting many people up to fail and go bankrupt?

All money today is digitally created. Why does the stimulus for the unemployed come with a steep price tag, when stimulus or the employed is a series of effortless *pings*? I have a bank account, but I was not eligible to offer my bank as a payment mediator. I have to take out new credit.

The key to understanding this is that when a bank issues credit for X dollars, it gets to create for the bank’s own account, 10 x X dollars on the balance sheet. Now, banks have tons of phantom wealth, issued straight from the government to the rich, but ultimately phantom wealth must run to ground or it evaporates. The way to force people to go back to work all of America’s non-existent jobs, they reason, is to load them up with credit they will work desperately to pay off. If they sign up. Then, if the citizen goes bust (like the poor always do, somehow, nudge nudge) that’s their fault and their bankruptcy. Whether or not the citizen fails, the bank gets to keep the remaining 90% of the dollars in the transaction. Banks of course, being too big to fail.

Needless to say, Patient Reader, the View is not feeling stimulated to open new Visa credit accounts, or buy a new car. Though, it’s probably the best thing I could do personally — open as many new cards as I can, grab the stimulus and run up all the new credit buying everything I really need and have been staving off –and then just default on it later, like they seem to want me to. But I won’t. I guess I must just already be a wiener.

UPDATE: Too rich NOT to repost, coming out just after I posted my blog. Awash in red ink: US posts record $3.1T 2020 budget deficit. Hmmmm….I’m glad I’m not on the hook for much of thatr. Tsk, tsk, tsk, all those stimulus checks to the rich, and tax cuts to corporations, and insane squabbling over who’s going to pay for New York’s ventilators, seems to have blown the deficit sky high. In this light, it appears my letter from the IRS, is really just a very sad scraping of the barrel, a last hustling-up of suckers from park benches, pinning carnations in their lapels, and telling them, go out and get ’em tiger, we’re all counting on you to pay off this horrible mess — er, seize the day. Let us know if you conquer Mexico and Canada and seize all their assets! Good luck! https://news.yahoo.com/us-budget-deficit-hits-time-180858849.html

I Can Dream, Can’t I?

Het Rijngoud

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THE DISMAL SCIENCE DEPT./
DUTCH STUDIES DIV./
OPERA BEAT

“Das Rheingold gives the background to the events that drive the main dramas of the cycle. It recounts Alberich‘s theft of the Rhine gold after his renunciation of love; his fashioning of the all-powerful Ring from the gold; and his enslavement of the Nibelungs; Wotan’s seizure of the gold and the Ring, to pay his debt to the Giants who have built his fortress Valhalla; Alberich’s curse on the Ring and its possessors; and Erda‘s warning to Wotan to forsake the golden Ring. The early manifestation of the curse’s power comes after Wotan yields the Ring to the Giants. The Gods enter uneasily into their Valhalla, across the Rainbow Bridge, but under the shadow of their impending doom.”
Quoth Wikipedia, Das Rheingold

Isn’t it ‘Das Rheingold?‘ The business end of the Rhine is in Holland, aldus…

In researching Utrecht’s civic history, I was excited to learn about archaeological discoveries on the now-silted-up-and-dammed Oud Rijn channel, that have uncovered the medieval emporium (or vicus) called Dorestad — fabled as “Vicus Magnus,” “Vicus Famosus,” etc. Learning about it provoked thought in the various View departments.

Digital re-creation of Dorestad, as it looked about c.e. 800. Note the fishbone layout of the town lots, each with its own wharf frontage; with warehouses and garden access at the back, possibly sub-let. (Compare with the fishbone layout of town lots in Edinburgh, 1124). Adjacency, closeness, IS the urban advantage; time is money. Somewhere in there is the Frankish Royal Mint. Frisian Dorestad was alternately controlled — and sacked — by Franks and Danes and Vikings. Whoever controlled Dorestad, controlled the mint, the worth of the coinage, and the trade and taxes of all around the North Sea. The Frankish assertion of control at Dorestad, was an assertion of Empire. The Vikings just wanted the cash.

Dorestad was a wijk, or wic, or wick, or wich, in the string of merchant trading posts Frisian-speakers set up all over North Europe in the 7th and 8th centuries. They were the first post-Roman, barbarian-owned-and-operated, inter-tribal European trade organization. They were a network of harbors and inlets along the North Sea coast, and the Channel coasts of Britain and France, and up into Scandinavia, with easy access to central Dorestad. Ipswich was Gip’s Wic; Greenwich was the Green Wich. York of course was Jor-vik, and for that matter New York is New Jor-vik. The site of an ideal Frisian wijk is a safe harbor at the mouth of an inlet wherever a lord can keep the pirates out; where merchant barges with inland produce could meet sea-faring vessels plying the coasts. Dorestad was the central hub of the Frisian system, and minted its gold and silver coin. It traded at a premium over lump gold and silver, for it was purity-guaranteed.

Portage by slaves was the key to Dorestad; access to both the Rhine/Vecht AND the Meuse/Scheldt!

The forgotten wick was in plain sight, underneath the little Dutch town called Wijk-bij-Duursteede. In the illustration below the insignificant bowed ditch, top right, is the Oud Rijn, the fount of treasure sung of in Het Rijngoud. You can see how it wandered away from the harbor.

Dorestad “Ludovic” coins, louis, from Dorestad. Note that the Frankish King is portrayed like a Roman Emperor.

Dorestad was known to have existed long before it was excavated, indicated by those excellent silver and gold coins, which have been dredged up all over Europe. These were marked by the Frankish kings as minted at “Dorestatus.”

Dorestad was founded as the capital of the Frisians, the center of their wiki-net. The Frisians put a wic here, right on the Wall Street of Medieval Europe, literally at the wall of the old Roman Limes, to harness the wealth, and coin the gold, of the Frankish Empire, as that wealth and gold came down the Rijn. Rijngoud!

VISIONS OF FRISIANS

You do know the Frisians, and quite well, under other names. English and Scots both descend from Old Frisian, a branch of West Germanic closely related to Old Saxon. The nation of shopkeepers, it seems, were shopkeepers even before they became a nation.

The Ingvaeonic linguistic group, north of the Rhine/Limes. North Sea Germanic in red, including Frisian. Saxon in yellow. Old Dutch, orange.

“Thanks to the Frankish conquest of Dorestad, what was originally just a Frisian affair became Frankish-Friesian commerce. Revenues from customs tariffs flowed into the Merovingian and Carolingian treasuries. From the time of Pippin II, a customs regime supervised shipping traffic and imposed taxes. In addition, it was the most productive mint in the Frankish empire. The first Frankish coins had been struck there as early as c.e. 635; and around 650 the Merovingian mint-master, Madelinus, was resident in the city. To satisfy its own demand for gold coinage, Dorestad minted its own coin, the donrijp.”
— Dirk Meier, Seafarers, Merchants and Pirates in the Middle Ages, 2006

Frisian King Radbad was both rad and bad, but in 695 he finally submitted to Pepin II of the Franks and surrendered Dorestad to Frankish control. Radbad saved his people’s life, and the seignorage of the mint at Dorestad, by submitting to be merely a duke — a peer, but under the Prince, the overweening Frankish “emperor.”

To secure a durable transition, Pepin played a bishop. He installed a mission in the ruined Roman fort at Trajectum just downriver from Dorestad, led by the Northumbrian (that is, Anglish) St. Willibrord. If a group of Anglo-Saxon monks could convert their kinsmen the Frisians and Old Saxons, to the Roman religion, they would thereby submit to the “Roman” emperor. But in 716, Radbad re-took his own. He re-conquered Frisia and Dorestad from the Franks, and sacked the Utrecht mission. Willibrord barely escaped, and many English monks were lost. Radbad’s glory lasted only three years. When the old Frisian king died in 719, there was a new Frankish king, too, Charles Martel. He quickly seized Frisia and put the Dorestad mint back in operation. Then he sent Willibrord back to Utrecht.

THE NEW ‘BORDERLANDS’ HISTORY

The Rhine was not only the flow of gold. It was the Limes Germanicus, the limit of Roman Empire that had been decreed by the Emperor Claudius. This gives a totally different face to the Frankish/Frisian rivalry/collusion. The rise of Dorestad matched the pattern of events on the border 300 years before, when the Romans were on the other side. Recently historians have discarded the old view of “barbarian invasions.” Instead, relying on archaeological evidence like that at Utrecht and Dorestad, they see that the Roman frontier, with its heavily-garrisoned walls and castella and trajectae, was a lure for the dealing and stealing that could be got there. Coins and armor and swords and wine, jobs in Caesar’s Praetorian Guard, trips in ships to Rome and Constantinople, distributions of silks and slaves, is what tempted the German tribes to jockey for position on the border in the first place. The Frisians were farthest of all border tribes from Rome, but in their tight little corner at the mouth of the Rijn, they found the cat-bird seat. And the river meant they could manage journeys to Rome faster than almost anybody else. At least for a while. That’s why the missionaries were excited to get the fort at Utrecht — it was an easy commute with frequent boats either way, to Rome or home to Northumbria.

“A key point about all this new wealth flowing into the German world, was that the profits were not evenly distributed in social terms: particular classes benefitted disproportionately. Nor were they equally distributed geographically. Most of the wealth-generating contacts distinctly favored groups settled in the immediate frontier zone. Transport logistics made it much easier for them to supply the Roman soldiers, the basic source of demand. High-value exchange networks, like those of slaves or amber, stretched far into the interior of Germania. Most of the wealth flows benefitted, solely or unequally, the frontier zone. And even longer-distance trade had to work its way through middle-men — kings taking tolls, if nothing else. [The Rijn, the Roman Limes] was the center of a zone of cultural and economic contact stretching out for some distance on either side, rather than a preclusive border.”
Peter Heather, Empires and Barbarians, 2009

The collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century caused a huge amount of disruption in established intra-regional trading structures in Northern Europe. By the seventh century, however, trade flows were strong enough again for kings to establish trading centers. The deal was straightforward. The king guaranteed protection for all mercantile activities taking place at the market he established, and in return charged the merchants a percentage in tolls and customs duties. From the age of the wood cut for its wharf pilings, Dorestad was in action by c.e. 650. Through the eighth century, other [wicks] opened up around the Baltic circle.
Peter Heather, Empires and Barbarians

Taking control of the coinage and the wicks, and the determined effort to convert the Frisians and continental Saxons to do so, was exactly the achievement we call the Carolingian Renaissance. This wealth, these sea lanes, were what lured yet another Northumbrian monk, Alcuin of York, to dazzle Charlemagne’s court at Aachen. Once Charlemagne’s family got hold of the Rhine Valley, it went to great lengths for several hundred years to keep it as a gerrymandered fiefdom at the very center of the Holy Roman Empire.

The Scandinavian Expansion came to Dorestad soon after 800. After Viking attacks in the 830s crippled Dorestad and Utrecht, the real trouble started in 841 when the Danes showed up to conquer Frisia back for the barbarians. Though sometimes called Vikings, Rorik, Hroerekr, and his brother Harald, Haraldr, were powerful Danish sea-lords. By 850 they had control of Dorestad, and the Franks….didn’t. The Franks had to cut a deal. The deal was Rorik would stop his cousins from burning the place down, in exchange for the seigneurage of the mint; but he had especially to keep the Vikings out, and to keep the coinage going for the crown. It was a tricky relationship.

Rorik of Dorestad’s the name –are you being SERVED!!??

“Hrørek the Norseman (Roric) held the vicus Dorestad as a benefice with his brother Haraldr in the time of the Emperor Louis the Pious. After the death of the emperor and his brother he was denounced as a traitor – falsely as it is said – to Lothair I, who had succeeded his father in the kingdom, and was captured and imprisoned. He escaped and became the faithful man of Louis the German. After he had stayed there for some years, living among the Saxons, who were neighbours of the Norsemen, he collected a not insubstantial force of Danes and began a career of piracy, devastating places near the northern coasts of Lothair’s kingdom. And he came through the mouth of the river Rhine to Dorestad, seized and held it. Because the emperor Lothar was unable to drive him out without danger to his own men, Hrørek was received back into fealty on the advice of his counsellors and through mediators on condition that he would faithfully handle the taxes and other matters pertaining to the royal fisc, and would resist the piratical attacks of the Danes.”
— Annales Fuldenses, for the year 850

Dorestad was sacked maybe a dozen times.

“Once you have paid him the Dane-geld
You never get rid of the Dane.”
— Rudyard Kipling.

Not until the Dane dies. Which Rorik did, about 870. Dorestad was an unprotected wijk and wide open to attack. Anyway, it was nearly silted up again.

GOING VIKING?

So how did Dorestad go under the silt? Oh, the Vikings. What does Viking even mean — oh, I get it. Going viking meant going to plunder the vikes. The wijks. To clip a wic. ‘Going out viking, honey, to bag a Sandwich, back after lunch.’

Summa pia gratia nostra conservando corpora et cutodita, de gente fera Normannica nos libera, quae nostra vastat, Deus, regna. “Our supreme and holy Grace, protecting us and ours, deliver us, God, from the savage race of Northmen which lays waste our realms”
— Antiphon for St. Vaast, 8th century

“By about c.e. 700, ocean-going ships superseded in-shore war canoes. Clinker-built strakes combined with a one-piece central keel and elevated prow and stern to create a hull with sufficient freeboard, and which was both strong and flexible enough to plough through ocean waves without either foundering or being battered to pieces. Second, sail technology appeared in Scandinavia. This involved learning not just about the sails themselves, and how to make them and use them to tack against the wind, but also about how to fix masts to hulls. The whole Scandinavian diaspora would have been impossible without this revolution. Why should this technology have been imported into the Baltic only around the year 700?
— Peter Heather, Empires and Barbarians

“It was precisely to serve the growing Western European demand in the markets; to grab a share of all the new wealth generated by [the wick-net] of markets, that Scandinavians developed ocean-going naval technology. The Norse raiders and traders not only took the trade into their own hands, but also redirected it to centers under their own control. Sacking the emporia was a game enjoyed by all self-respecting Vikings, and by the 10th century, the only ones in operation, which included Rouen, York and Dublin, were under Scandinavian control. The whole Viking diaspora of the ninth and tenth centuries must be seen as a consequence of the emporia system of the seventh and eighth.”
— Peter Heather, Empires and Barbarians

“And they came to the church of Lindisfarne, laid everything waste with grievous plundering, trampled the holy places with polluted feet, dug up the altars and seized all the treasures of the holy church. They killed some of the brothers; some they took away with them in fetters; many they drove out, naked and loaded with insults; and some they drowned in the sea.”
— Simeon of Durham, 793

“It is some 350 years that we and our forefathers have inhabited this lovely land, and never before in Britain has such a terror appeared as this we have now suffered at the hands of the heathen. Nor was it thought possible that such an inroad from the sea could be made. “Then the Lord said unto me, [Jeremiah 1:14] ‘Out of the North an evil shall break forth upon all the inhabitants of the land.’ “
— Alcuin of York, after hearing at Aachen about the Viking sack of Lindisfarne and Northumbria

The Fibula of Dorestad, about 800. The fine artistry of the Carolingian Renaissance was what Rijngoud commanded.

The cultural memory of Dorestad must be behind the legend of the Rheingold or Rijngoud. A Ring, the Precious, forged from stolen lump-gold, even though its magic was guarded in purity by three virgin nixies; for its golden power, the Dwarf forswore love, and the Heroes and Gods and Giants fought, and Siegfried slayed the dragon, and for which the Valkyre lost her chance to love like a human. And by which power, the Gods had the Giants build their dream house on high, but left the debt in arrears — so they were cast down again, and their mortgaged house went up in flames, then “underwater,” tumbling back down into the Rijn, at twilight… all this, the cultural remembrance of the shiny coins you could schlepp home from your risky Rijn Journey to trade with the giants at Dorestad.

EPILOGUE: HOW UTRECHT ROSE AS THE NEW DORESTAD

Dorestad’s ability to draw traders from all over Europe proved that the Rijn Delta was the “Money River” — Vonnegut’s phrase – in Europe. Traders were sold the privilege of a few yards of river-front, permission to lie down and lap at the Money River. When the Oud Rijn silted up once too often, and Dorestad was sacked once too often by its erstwhile Viking protectors, it took a few hundred years, under the new Counts of Holland, and the Prince-Bishops of Utrecht, to tame the business end of the Rijn.

Utrechters dammed and canalized the landschaap, and compacted the town layout behind walls, retaining for most burghers that important access to their strip of wharf. In 1142, the same year the damming commenced, the City of Utrecht was formally chartered as an urbis and officially given the seignorage of its mint. In essence, it was the New Dorestad. Like the old emporium, it faced constant armed threat from the grasping Counts of Holland and the half-barbarian Saxon Dukes of Guelders on the other. As at Dorestad, Utrechters bought and sold on credit, but reckoned, finally, in the gold and silver coins they minted for you. They gave the trader a premium, but the city took its cut. This was but replicating the central position of Dorestad as the source of het Rijngoud. Utrecht kept this spot until about 1630; when silt and currents, of the Rijn and of history, shifted the Rijngoud to the coast, leading to the rise of Amsterdam. As we shall View.

The Penny Finally Drops

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During all the horrific events this year, the View has been frustrated that finding reliable, informed journalism is nearly impossible. You have to be steely-eyed in the hunt for it, hacking away all the garbage ads and pop-ups and fake news (sic). And all the click-bait you have to swat aside. And you have to know what to look for in the first place — because Woden knows, the ‘Net will only show you what it thinks you ought to want.

I finally found a fascinating and very moving report about Cup Foods, by Ayman Ismail on Slate, following up on “What Happened To The Counterfeit $20 Bill That George Floyd Got Killed For?” Recall, that this issue obsessed me. (As does, who set the fire at St. John’s Lafayette Square?) Much is made clearer; it’s worth reading…but still….

https://slate.com/human-interest/2020/10/cup-foods-george-floyd-store-911-history.html

The report only left me angrier and more frustrated, by confirming what we already knew. A convenience store in a tough Black neighborhood, owned by hard-working Palestinian immigrants. They seem to have a fine relationship with their customers. They left the shop that night to be run by some greenhorn 19-year-old underlings, but kept the cell phone handy in case trouble arose. The poor clerk who called the cops and didn’t know what he was doing, but felt he had to, and caused all this violence, is devastated by what he’s done. The family and community struggle to move on.

Why is a 19-year-old minimum-wage immigrant child-worker charged with investigating currency crimes? Where’s the FBI? Why did this schnook feel he HAD TO call local cops on a hot Covid-y Memorial Day night over an inky Andrew Jackson? Is there a dangerous counterfeiting ring running in southern Minnesota? Is all the money there worthless? Are customers usually liable for passing fake notes? Am I liable if I pass a fake note? How would I even know? If the cop they call at the laundromat is a homophobe, will I get a knee on my neck? Why is there no evidence of this crime?

So I went sleuthing again; finally I found the answer, the key detail that most reports have missed. It was filed on June 1, so maybe you missed it too:

https://www.sctimes.com/story/news/2020/06/03/what-we-know-fake-currency-and-george-floyds-death-minneapolis-counterfeit-police/5310999002/

“Cup Foods owner Mahmoud Abumayyaleh questioned whether Floyd even knew he used a counterfeit, in a statement posted on Facebook Sunday. He told TRT, a Turkish public broadcast service, that normally officers ask a few questions about counterfeits, “put it in a bag and take it.”

In the 911 transcript a Cup Foods clerk told the dispatcher: ‘Um, someone comes our store and give us fake bills and we realize it before he left the store, and we ran back outside, they was sitting on their car.’ A former employee and customer of the shop Angel Stately told the New York Times she saw the bill and the ink was running on it. Stately could not be reached for additional comment.

‘As a check-cashing business, this is a routine practice for us: we report forged money, then the police come and ask patrons about the bill to trace its origin. Upon receiving a counterfeit bill from George Floyd, one of our employees called the police in accordance with this procedure,’ according to the statement on Facebook.”
— Norah G. Hertel, USA TODAY, June 1 2020

A check-cashing business in a ghetto neighborhood is often the ONLY SOURCE of actual currency, into that neighborhood. This is probably the only place the unbanked can cash their paychecks. This Palestinian immigrant family is the neighborhood banker. God knows what cut they take, usually 20 percent. Now the tragedy makes sense; in a sense. Any currency that comes into their store that isn’t from them, is suspect anyway.

There were reports of a small-time counterfeiting ring in Southern Minnesota that spring. I’m sure the check-cashing places were told it was their job to report all questionable currency, as the local credit shop, where lots of currency can expect to pass, not just bubble-gum sales. This kid bit on a coin and found it wasn’t silver but lead. In his mind he’s a banker faced with a bank robber. All he knows is it was somehow his job to keep the coinage pure, and as a good guy, in this strange country, fearing that he would be found responsible otherwise, he called the civic guards to seize the real bad guy before he got away and it was too late. Then, he had to watch as the drunk guy he fingered was murdered before his eyes.

Is it cynical, or shocking, or reductionist, to hunt for the meaning of these events in suspect coinage and credit? Does it really all come down to a single ball-point-pen-smeared slip of promissory paper, that may not have existed? Actually, I believe it magnifies the significance of George Floyd’s murder considerably. All the actors in the tragedy that night were there for money — the Palestinian family, the eager-beaver young immigrant (West African, by the way), lured to come to America for the money they could make, the chorus of neighborhood customers who frequented Cup Foods because they could cash and spend at the same place, but who resented the take and the seedy atmosphere. Even the villainous cop Chauvin, who was working out his own crimped attitudes about just who deserves the free right to walk into a store and spend like he was somebody, was really just out working his night shift. Clocked in, killed the guy, clocked out. Even the in-his-cups victim, if he impossibly WAS a counterfeiter, which is the McGuffin of the whole tragedy everybody involved expects us to take seriously –– then he was literally there to “make” money, too, at the only place he could spend his craft into existence.

It’s scary because most of us are anywhere, most of the time, to slip or receive money. Less and less of it is cash for white people, but that only exacerbates the problem: it’s not intuitive what money is anymore, or why it’s digital and plastic for some, but grubby and inky for others, or why it’s all gotten so desperate and expensive if it’s so easy and digital and super-abundant, or how you get it anymore, or what the fuck we’re doing anymore in America at all.

Is slipshod, unregulated credit in night markets really getting people killed and inciting racial strife? Sure, when certain groups have so much money it’s not good for them; and other groups are allowed to PRETEND they have tons of money and put on airs, when they only really have tons of debt; and still other groups have so little money they are a priori accused of stealing it if they have it. Are we that different from barbarians fighting over shiny lumps of fool’s gold?

The next post Views the issue of debt money vs. the barbarian problem, more deeply — in fact, I’ll follow the dropping penny all the way to the bottom of the Rhine.

The Valley Village View

Welcome to the blog of writer and musician Andrew Martin. Here I'll post original photographs and observations as I encounter the history and culture of the San Fernando Valley, the City of the Angels, Alta California and the far-flung Pacific Rim… but mostly the Valley.

Lessons, In Futility

I Can Dream, Can’t I?

Het Rijngoud

The Penny Finally Drops