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1.
Better to go down dignified
With boughten friendship at your side
Than none at all. Provide, provide!
—Robert Frost, “Provide, Provide!” (1936)
OF ALL SUBJECTS of worry, idealistic contemplation and focused ratiocination, money must be the premier topic on the American mind. More insistent and fascinating than sex, sports, status, kinship, loyalty, love, it is almost a Kantian Pure Idea for us. Money is fully alive, not merely metonymic in our imaginations. It is like a Dickens character, a walking, talking type, a bundle of idiosyncratic and aggravating personifications.
Go anywhere, look anywhere, and money squats at the center of our moral and imaginative landscape. We mistake it for class, caste or status. We invest it with ideas, will, memory. We are shameless about money, boasting of our bank balances, our investments (real and imagined), our fiduciary goals.
We are addicted to the green dope. We love and loathe it. We fly from it and pursue it, like a love-besotted speaker in some early sonnet. It is far more romantic to us than mere human love. Acquisition gives us a mainline jolt more rapturous than the deepest sexual climax.
The fermenting, fecund American language is laden with words and phrases for money. Our vernacular reaches its creative apex in the way we coin phrases (see!), mint synonyms for the simple transactional symbol that is money. Here is a tiny anthology of linguistic blooms from The Thesaurus of American Slang, a fraction of the entries covering pages under money and its avatars.
Ackjay [pig Latin classicizes it], the actual, boodle, bunce, collat., dinero, the doin’s, do-re-mi, ducats, filthy lucre, fish, geetus, gelt, jack, jake, kopecks, mazumas, the needful, oof, oofish, oughday [more pig Latin], pazaza, possibles, root of all evil, shekels, spondulics or spondulix, simoleons, wampum, wherewithal.
When we visualize it in its material form, we transform it poetically: bangers, beans, nails, picayune, half a ned, bat hides, lettuce, the green, green boys, greeners, greenies, greenjackets, greens, the long green, William [a bill, you see].
And we have a chrestomathy of terms for every denomination of our cash: a cent or penny; a nickel or nedio or thrip; a dime or deemer or shiner; two bits; a dollar or ace or lamb’s tongue; a five-spot, which is a half-sawbuck or a fin, finf, finnif or finnuf.
If we criminalize money, it becomes even livelier in our vulgate. We generate an electric flow of periphrasis, as insistent as eighteenth-century “poetic diction” on hiding the simple, lowdown nature of transactions. Borrowed money becomes breeze, mooch, nick, shakedown, touch. Extorted money becomes boodle, screw or squeeze.
The money we lay by, following Robert Frost’s edict to provide, is an ace in the hole, a nest egg, something in the sock or salted away, a grubstake, food money, a soup bone. We will eat it, it is nutritious, with 100 percent of the needed daily vitamins and minerals. We masticate sodden bills and munch coins till they ring in our maws. We have always known that “you can’t eat money,” when we remind ourselves of its merely symbolic nature. But too easily we forget, and money becomes for us the bread and water of life, the substance of spirit as well as body. Buy us this day our daily bread, we pray, forgetting to ask. We lay away our treasures to rust, pay for life on the installment plan, calculate the mortgages on our souls in compound interest. Thomas Carlyle, in Sartor Resartus, saw us as a society hidden behind its clothing, wearing its lies as disguises. Today we dress ourselves proudly in suits of new money: not greenback bills but credit cards and bonds and internet transactions.
2.
Goodbye, goodbye, old stones, the time-order is going,
I have married my hands to perpetual agitation,
I run, I run to the whistle of money.
Money money money
Water water water
—Theodore Roethke, “The Lost Son” (1948)
AMERICAN MONEY is different. Our paper bills are green or greenish, hand-sized, deliciously engraved, uniform in size and unvarying—super-efficient for rapid Yankee transactions. They are mystical in purport, depicting Enlightenment sages like Jefferson and Hamilton, bearing Latin mottoes and weird symbols from the Illuminati. They are immensely utilitarian, also portraying frontier roughnecks like Jackson, Lincoln and Grant—money is a passport to regeneration, self-creation. It is a ticket to Parnassus.
English money is funny money: big, awkward bills like grade school graduation certificates, white and mauve. The coins are less mystical after decimalization but still randomly-sized and uncoinlike. The Brits keep a few slang terms afloat—tanner, copper—and some odd archaisms like guineas and crowns. They have pence where we have pennies—once they had flotillas of teeny currency: farthings, half-pence, tuppence, thruppence. A small-change culture. But English coinage is lifeless, reticent, retarded compared to the autonomous energy of Big American Bucks.
American coins carry our mythology rather than our jingoistic emblems. Pennies once carried an Indian head: they were red, small and relatively worthless. Hordes of redskins on the opening frontiers of commerce. Nickels, too, commemorated an Indian chief and a buffalo, that most American of beasts: once marvelously plentiful and fecund, murdered to near-extinction, big, herd-oriented grasseaters that were pastoral but tough. We remember the creatures we annihilate, pass the memorials from hand to hand to buy our necessaries.
No one speaks of one-cent or five-cent pieces nor ten-cent pieces or twenty-five-cent pieces: pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters. They are familiar, colloquial pals. I hear the whining, insinuating, quintessentially American voice of W.C. Fields as a frontier pipsqueak conman, wheedling: “Can you produce some of the elusive spondulicks?” Updated to the 21sty century, that is Money talks and bullsh*t walks.
It talks all right. And we listen, as the brokerage house promotion ads said. We tapdance to the jingle of money, sit up and bark at Roethke’s keen whistle of money (the dawn-shift factory whistles, the train whistle in the night, the traffic policeman’s whistle urging on the flow of work-and-spend, the master’s whistle fetching home the good doggies on the payroll). Money is our compass, our bellwether, the buoy leading us like a kindly angel through the tempests of life. It gives meaning and direction to our lives when we find no other sense to their shapes.
“Who steals my purse steals trash,” says Iago, that most winsome, ingratiating and diabolically treacherous of murderers, while also urging “Put money in thy purse.” He is the most modern of Shakespeare’s self-divided men, master of doublethink when money enters his imagination. He lusts for money, lusts to destroy Othello’s unmonied power and happiness.
To amuse himself, to assure himself he is a man and not a mere tool, a creature, Iago makes others his tools, manipulates to destroy. It is no wonder that images of money, of payment and credit and debt infect his mind and passions. His quiet mania, his jesting madness might be commemorated by some as-yet-unissued money. Iago’s smiling countenance on one side, on the other a grasping hand and the motto (rendered perhaps into dog-Latin), “Put up or shut up!”
3.
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.
—William Wordsworth (1807)
IT IS EASY, of course, having gained some money to scorn it, to vilify the bottom-line, greed-and-grasp mentality of our culture. The poor of cash thirst after a sound credit rating. We are assured by every medium of our society that a little money will cure all ills: Better health?—put money in thy purse! longer life?—put money in thy purse! success in romance?—p.m.i.t.p.! And we have the entertaining spectacle of a world (we have numbered it for convenience the Third World) dying for lack of small monies.
As the planet’s population surges past six billion, small change becomes bigger. We convert all problems into cashflow and microeconomics. The symbolic transactions of money have become for us realized—we believe that heaps of money are instrumental, willed, cerebral. “Smart money,” we imagine, like “smart bombs.”
An old vaudeville song, “Ace in the Hole,” by George Mitchell and James Dempsey, captures it—the conflation of money and wisdom, money and virtue:
This town in full of guys
Who think they’re mighty wise,
Just because they know a thing or two.
You can see them every day
Strolling up and down Broadway,
Telling of the wonders they can do.
You’ll see wise guys and boosters,
Card sharps and crapshooters
They congregate around the Metropole.
They wear fancy ties and collars,
But where do they get those dollars?
They’ve all got an ace down in the hole.
Now, some of them write to the old folks at coin,
And that is their ace in the hole.
While others have girls on the old Tenderloin,
And that is their ace in the hole.
The song goes on to say that these pimps and penniless financiers are only parasites: “their names would be mud/Like a chump dealing stud,/If they lost that old ace in the hole.”
It is an exuberant song celebrating the vitality and energy of American life. It is also charged with the vernacular of money and its making, taking us into a world of conmen and grifters, bilko game operators, sharks and rubes. Once we could pretend this was mere “lowlife,” the petty underworld out of sight of the respectable bourgeoisie.
Today we live next door to drug merchants, meth labs, gun runners, the diversified Mafia of the 21st century who dwell in securely walled residential enclaves and who buy yacht-sized boats to make just one cocaine run. We’re all out there on the line with the wiseguys and boosters, who after all wear the same faces as our corporate raiders and multinational CEOs. Mack the Knife now shops on Rodeo Drive and will soon appear on your favorite late-nite talk show to explain the mysteries of high finance. Welcome to the Threepenny Opera! ###
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