A Sheila on a Sawbuck??

This morning, I received a visit from Dr. Benjamin Cash, a branch chief from the Treasury Department. He was there to review the results of a currency logistics mathematical model which I developed after being requested to do so last June, when Treasury Secretary Jack Lew announced that a portrait of a woman would replace Alexander Hamilton on the obverse side of the US ten dollar bill. The model calculates the lengths of service and rates of circulation, inactivity and return for destruction of ten dollar notes bearing various female portraits, assuming the reverse remains constant and consists of a neutral image of a well-known public building, in terms of a matrix of parametric partial differential coefficients representing esthetic, political, cultural, regional, historical, social and normative influences. Given that Secretary Lew had further stated this month that a decision would be made later this year, Dr. Cash was understandably anxious.
“Tom,” he said as he took the chair positioned immediately to the right of mine, next to my desk, “I hope you’re done with this model, because the Ten Dollar Note Portrait Replacement Selection Committee is meeting tomorrow, and we’re going to need the results.”
“Relax,” I told him. “It was ready for presentation last Wednesday.”
“Okay, okay,” he chortled, rubbing his hands together in anticipation, “what have we got?”
“As we agreed last June, the model considers a list of candidates identified by multiple methods. The first was the candidate list compiled by the organization Women on 20’s, who, as their Web site says, campaigned to have a portrait of a woman replace Andrew Jackson on the US twenty dollar bill. It appears, by the way, that they feel highly betrayed by Secretary Lew for deciding to put a woman’s portrait on a ten dollar bill instead.”
“Oh hell,” he shrugged, “what could Jack do, anyway? The Secretary of the Treasury can’t kow-tow to every group that puts up a Web site and conducts a six-hundred thousand vote poll on the Internet, now can it? No way we could get rid of Andrew Jackson!”
“It certainly would have pleased the Native Americans,” I observed, “if you did. Many of them won’t even accept a twenty dollar bill because it has Andrew Jackson’s picture on it.”
“Really?” Dr. Cash responded, incredulous. “What’s their problem with Andrew Jackson?”
“To make a long story short,” I analogized, “Jack Lew is Jewish, isn’t he?”
“Oh, yeah,” Benjamin nodded, “definitely – Orthodox, actually.”
“Well,” I asked, “how would Jack Lew feel about it if the twenty dollar bill had a picture of Adolph Hitler on it?”


My guest blushed a deep shade of crimson. “Not too good, I suppose.”
“Right,” I continued, “and that’s how Native Americans feel about Andrew Jackson. If somebody gives them a twenty, they get rid of it as quickly as possible, often for a pair of tens.”
“Hmm,” Benjamin mused, “that scores a few points for Wilma Mankiller, I guess.”
“A Cherokee chief on the ten dollar bill would definitely pose a significant counterpoint to Andrew Jackson on the twenty,” I agreed. “But the model showed that last name of hers is a real deal killer – no pun intended. And the model also shows she scores highest for the Sacagawea Effect, the phenomenon that killed the Sacagawea Dollar.”
“Oh yeah,” he sighed. “At least nobody proposed her again.”
“No,” I conceded, “but Susan B. Anthony was, in fact, proposed for the twenty dollar bill and so included in my model for the ten, despite the fact that the SBA dollar was a complete disaster.”
“So it was,” he nodded. “How did she do in the model?”
“Worse on the ten dollar bill than on the dollar coin,” I revealed.
“No surprise there,” he opined. “How did things shake out generally, with respect to your model?”
“Betty Friedan,” I began, “came in dead last. Put her face on a ten dollar bill and the damn things will go completely out of circulation everywhere in less than two years. Second from the bottom, with scores only slightly better, there’s a big cluster of similar losers – Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Alice Paul, Frances Perkins and, of course, Susan B. Anthony, every one of them either suffragettes, feminists or both. Name recognition was a big factor with all of them, too, even with Susan B. Anthony. It seems that despite that SBA dollar thing, she’s been more or less completely forgotten by everyone except hard core liberals. Generally, putting a suffragette and / or feminist on the ten dollar bill will, at best, result in marginally satisfactory utilization and circulation rates in places like New York City, San Francisco, Boston, Seattle and Washington DC, plus the usual academic enclaves like Austin, Texas. Everywhere else, those bills are going to be coming back to the regional Federal Reserve Banks and piling up like Blackberrys at a municipal landfill.”
Dr. Cash flashed me a worldly smile. “Basically, you’re saying that word would get around among men about what these women stood for, and then the guys would take a look at the reality they live in – working their butts off to pay child support for kids that DNA tests conclusively prove are another man’s progeny; the courts completely bowing down to the women in every matter of domestic common law; absurd alimony judgements; women routinely advised by lawyers to commit perjury, submitting defamatory false scripted testimony in divorce cases; the whole ball of wax, and feel pissed off and dirty just touching a ten dollar bill.”
“Hey,” I commented, “who can blame them? And you’re leaving out the guys who were open minded enough to marry a feminist and got doubly screwed, especially in states where professional degrees aren’t legally considered marital property. Factor all that in, and add the women who abhor feminists for various conservative cultural reasons, and you might as well not have a ten dollar bills anywhere but New York City, San Francisco, Boston, Seattle and Washington DC, and the usual academic enclaves like Austin, Texas. It’s basically the same thing as the Cherokee Nation Andrew Jackson Effect – you’re not going to find any currency with portraits of that, um… gentleman… on any American Indian reservations. By the same token, you’re not likely to find any currency with portraits of Betty Friedan, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Alice Paul, Frances Perkins or Susan B. Anthony on US currency in regions of the United States where the concept of demonizing men is widely recognized as a manifestation of the salient fascist aspect of contemporary feminism. In the latter case, however, that turns out to be about ninety-nine percent of the nation.”
“This is all available in… reports, and so forth, I assume?” Benjamin inquired.
“Naturally,” I replied. “After this meeting, I’ll deliver you a sixteen terabyte USB memory stick loaded with software that embeds the model application and database along with numerous reporting and display options. I could, of course, use it to produce an impressive array of summaries, tables and PowerPoint presentations, but at my rates, that would be fairly expensive, and I’m certain you can save Treasury a considerable sum and achieve exactly what you need using the deliverable yourself. Feel free to call me if you have any questions, of course.”
“Oh, excellent,” he purred, settling back into his seat with an obvious air of satisfaction. “You were saying?”
“Moving from the flat-out failures to the ten dollar portrait candidates who scored somewhat higher – from the ‘Fs’ to the ‘Ds,’ if you will – there were the African American heroines – Sojourner Truth, Shirley Chisholm, Barbara Jordan, Rosa Parks, and Harriet Tubman. Frankly, I respect their achievements, as I am sure you do also, but practically speaking, the model shows the Dixie Effect in complete domination of the parametric coefficients. Name recognition issues, in fact, placed Sojourner Truth, Shirley Chisholm and Barbara Jordan at the bottom of the pack. The fact that Sojourner Truth was born in 1797 certainly didn’t help. Actually, Sojourner Truth placed slightly lower than Frances Paul, but I sincerely believe that the benefit of the doubt applies, since the difference was within a ninety-percent error limit. And I sincerely hope that I can put this as delicately and tactfully as can possibly be achieved, but… well… let’s face it, every single one of these women are… ah… endowed with a… shall we say… truly strong and striking African American female countenance.”
“Yeah,” Benjamin confirmed with an exasperated tone, “I know what you mean. They all fell off the top of the Ugly Tree and got whacked by every stick on the way down.”
“Spoken like a true African American man,” I told Dr. Cash. “And tell me, speaking as an African American man, what would you do if you requested one hundred and fifty dollars from an bank’s outdoor ATM and it gave you seven twenties with pictures of Andrew Jackson and a ten dollar bill with a picture of any one of those women on it?”
“Them?” he exclaimed. “How about I go in the bank and ask for two fives with a picture of Abe Lincoln on them?”
“What if it’s the middle of the night and the bank is closed?” I pressed.
“Oh, damn,” he protested, “you be makin’ it damn hard on me. I mean, I wanna get rid of that thing as quick as I can, sure, but ten dollars is ten dollars. I guess I’d put that piece of [expletive] in my pocket and make sure it was the first bill I spent.”
“Like at a nearby gas station or convenience store?” I suggested.
“Yeah, yeah,” he nodded, “either one would do. Buy ten dollars worth of gas right away so’s I can get that nasty thing out of my wallet, that would be the best plan.”
“So as you can see,” I commented, “not only down South, where there would be the predictable racist and sexist backlash by white men against the African American Heroine ten dollar bills, even furthermore, black men located anywhere in the US would be so disgusted at being reminded of… um… the degree of distinguished African American female character expressed in…”
“They be ugly!” Benjamin ejaculated. “They be damned ugly! I am not buyin’ no hot [expletive] at some outrageous expensive nightclub no overpriced drinks with pictures of some ugly-[expletive] old [expletive], I don’t care if she walk on water with Jesus Christ across the [expletive] Jordan River!”
“You have passionately expressed in words,” I told him, “what the model coldly calculated with digital algorithms. As soon as any male in the United States of America, white, black, Asian, Hispanic, or otherwise, who lives outside the aforementioned areas of New York City, San Francisco, Boston, Seattle and Washington DC, or the usual academic enclaves, sees a ten dollar bill bearing a portrait of Sojourner Truth, Shirley Chisholm, Barbara Jordan, Rosa Parks, or Harriet Tubman, his first reaction will be to want to get as far away from that thing as he possibly can, as quickly as possible.”
“Amen to that,” Benjamin agreed. “Ain’t no man wants a picture of some ‘Bama sharecropper’s grands on the money he buys his Saturday night fun with!”
“Presumably,” I chided, “when you are less incensed, you will be able to translate your sentiments from the Ebonic dialect into mainstream English.”
“Sorry,” he replied. “Rest assured, tomorrow morning, the Treasury Department Ten Dollar Note Portrait Replacement Selection Committee will receive the full benefit of all four years of my attendance at Harvard. Please, continue.”
“Moving from the back of the pack to the middle,” I went on, “Margaret Sanger did slightly better than Margaret Thatcher…”
“Margaret Thatcher?” Cash interrupted. “What’s she doing in there?”
“Jeb Bush,” I explained, “suggested her. For the sake of completeness, I included all the women suggested by the Republican candidates in last week’s debate, other than the obviously facetious ones, such as Mike Huckabee’s wife, Ben Carson’s mother, or Donald Trump’s daughter. Rand Paul suggested Susan B. Anthony, which may indicate something about his ultimate chances in the presidential race. Marco Rubio said he would like to see Rosa Parks on the ten dollar bill, which is interesting, considering that he could have suggested an Hispanic; perhaps he presumes he will have the Hispanic vote tied up and figures recommending Parks might increase his chances with black voters. I say my theory on that is bolstered by the fact that Ted Cruz tried to outdo him by saying Parks should be on the twenty. So now we know that whatever stupidity Marco Rubio comes up with, we can count on Ted Cruz to double down on it. Chris Christy said he would choose Abigail Adams, which is very interesting, since during an argument with her husband about the Alien and Sedition Act, she had the guts to tell John Adams that he had a big fat arse, and, as we both know, you could fit two entire John Adamses into Chris Christy’s ample rump and still have room for a Martin van Buren. She and Mother Theresa both did as well as both of the Maggies, by the way, which is not to say putting portraits of any of them on a ten dollar bill would be a particularly good idea. There’s a very nice portrait of Abigail Adams when she was young that would look good on a ten dollar bill, but it’s by an unknown artist. Presumably, the Treasury Department would want to use one of the Gilbert Stuart portraits.”
“Yes,” he confirmed, “you’re almost certainly correct about that. The Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington on the one dollar bill is more or less some sort of gold standard.”
“Right,” I responded, “and unfortunately, marrying and living with John Adams was not, apparently, salubrious to young Miss Abigail Smith’s looks.”
“Okay,” he allowed, “including the new names introduced by the Republican presidential candidates last week what do we have?”
“A ten dollar bill with a portrait of Margaret Sanger in her prime would be accepted by about seventy percent of the female population and twenty-five percent of the male population in northern and western urban centers. Her advocacy of birth control is a big factor in that, particularly with the women. Otherwise, forget about it – in the South, her name is perceived by ninety-two percent of the population as being Jewish. In rural areas across the nation, religious conservatives predominate, and ‘birth control’ is a dirty word – a ten dollar bill with her picture would be deemed the work of the Devil, a harbinger of the End Times, or both. Interestingly enough, by contrast, a ten dollar bill with a picture of Margaret Thatcher would do significantly better in both the South and in rural areas generally. There is very little evidence that people in those regions know who ‘Margaret Thatcher’ was, but it doesn’t seem to matter. That she served eleven years as the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and never was a citizen of the United States are apparently irrelevant – her picture, combined with her name, seem to have some kind of eerie appeal that puts her five to seven percentage points ahead of Sanger. I mention these facts about Thatcher primarily to emphasize how lame the other contenders discussed up to this point are, of course. That said, Mother Teresa, suggested by John Kasich, did better than both Maggies and Abigail Adams. Furthermore, she managed to take a splinter off the resistance in the Solid South by showing positive model responses in Louisiana, which has a very sizable Catholic population. Nevertheless, putting any of these women on a ten dollar bill, even if it were legal in the case of Thatcher and Mother Teresa, which, of course, it is not, would be an act of unmitigated folly. None of them could keep the ten dollar bill in meaningful circulation – defined as one half of the 2014 circulation rate for two dollar bills – sustained nationwide more than three years.”
“Ten dollar bills are already considered to be bad luck,” Benjamin noted. “No point in making the situation worse. Who’s next?”
“That would be Rachel Carson and Patsy Mink,” I said. “There are existing pictures of them in which they look okay, and assuming those were used, the esthetics would be innocuous. There is a severe name recognition problem with both of them, which is understandable in the case of Patsy Mink, the first Asian American woman elected to Congress. Absolutely nobody knows who the hell she was, but she sort of looks like the Vietnamese lady at the nail salon, and the model predicts women in most American urban and suburban localities will find that unobjectionable. The model also parses ‘Patsy Mink’ as a cute name, which is helpful. On the other hand, people really ought to know who Rachel Carson was, but they don’t. She’s been largely forgotten, which, in itself, isn’t all that bad. The model parses ‘Rachel Carson’ as a white, Anglo Saxon name with neutral to slightly positive connotations and her image scores reasonably high for empathy among women and college educated men. Bottom line, close, but no Monica Lewinsky cigar. The model says, pick either one, and their mug on a ten dollar bill will put it completely out of circulation in less than five years.”
“[Expletive],” he groused, “I’m losing track here. Is there anybody left?”
“Yes,” I answered, “the last two, which also happen to be he most viable. The model predicts that an image of Clara Barton could keep the ten dollar bill in circulation for a minimum of ten years. And if Treasury decides to bite the bullet, weather the storm of lesbian feminist protest, and use a picture of Eleanor Roosevelt from when she was less than thirty years old, the ten dollar bill could, theoretically at least, continue to circulate indefinitely at current levels. The young Eleanor Roosevelt, in summary, is the only feasible obverse portrait female alternative which, ceteris paribus, could sustain the ten dollar bill in the absence of Alexander Hamilton or replacement of his portrait by that of a similar male Founding Father, or latter equivalent, such as, dare I suggest, FDR himself; or Eisenhower, Woodrow Wilson, Truman or John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Otherwise, forget it – put any of these women other than FDR’s wife on the ten dollar bill and it will be making a bee line for the ash heap of history.”
A long silence ensued as Benjamin stared at the handmade antique oriental carpet. “That’s what I figured,” he finally admitted with a crestfallen tone.
“Oh come now,” I joshed, “it can’t be that bad. Sure, Franklin turned Eleanor into a crusty old bull dyke whose skin was as tender as DiMaggio’s glove and dated Margaret Mead, but…”
“No, no, it’s not that,” he insisted, waving his hands dismissively. “Eleanor Roosevelt would be just fine! And not just with me, with the entire Ten Dollar Note Portrait Replacement Selection Committee! We all figured she was the best choice from the very beginning, and what’s more, now your mathematical model proves it! But the fix is in, Tom! It’s orders from over there!” he lamented as he rose from his seat and pointed an accusing finger at the White House through the picture window in front of the couch. “Obama says it’s his legacy! The Committee, your model, all our other research, don’t you see? It’s all [expletive] window dressing! Damn it, Tom, it was all decided before this charade ever began! No matter what anybody says, no matter what you or I or the Committee do, Obama’s going to put Harriet Tubman on the ten dollar bill!”
“At least,” I observed, “it won’t matter much. Credit cards have been eating away at cash transactions for over half a century. By now, the erosion has been accelerated by cash transfer apps like ApplePay and online currencies like BitCoin. Think about it – what do people use cash for these days?”
“Stuff they don’t want traced?” Benjamin guessed.
“Exactly,” I confirmed. “As of the first quarter of 2015, fifty seven percent of the time, they use cash for hard core pornography, sex toys, gambling, drugs, guns, prostitutes and liquor.”
“Liquor?” Buck echoed, obviously somewhat puzzled.
“You do know,” I pointed out, “that the credit card companies track liquor sales, don’t you?”
“No I didn’t,” he replied with a shocked expression.
“Yeah,” I vouched, “and if they don’t like what they see, they raise your interest rate.”
“Damn!” he exclaimed. “Now I get what those [expletive] have been doing to me! Thanks.”
“You’re welcome,” I told him. “Anyway, by the time Treasury manages to actually start printing ten dollar bills with pictures of Harriet Tubman on them, practically one hundred percent of cash transactions will be for hard core pornography, sex toys, gambling, drugs, guns, prostitutes and liquor.”
“Huh!” Benjamin mused as he crossed his arms across his chest and stared out the picture window at the White House. “In that case, you think the truck stop whores are gonna start calling the thirty dollar half-and-half the Triple Tubman?”
“Stranger things,” I assured him “have happened.”