Bathroom Monologue: Rejected Proposal #4

So what we’ll do is print a small explanation along with the coin. You can’t have failed to notice that the U.S. Mint has set George Washington’s giant head looming over president elect Obama on the one side, which is a very odd idea on its own. President Washington owned Negro slaves. They worked for him in Virginia. I guess the vague idea was that he has a really idealized image as president, and so we’ll just associate him with other guys we like, like Obama. They could have just as easily put Thomas Edison’s head behind him – if anybody knew what he looked like. But we don’t, and we don’t have a Lincoln/Obama coin here. We have a Washington/Obama coin, on which we will print the bold-faced rationalization that President Washington emancipated his slaves in his will, and thus had he lived to this century he would have happily let Obama stop working on his plantation and let him be president just as soon as he died. I think that should take the potential offense out of it for everyone.