A couple of years ago, Ecuador's economy went
thud, and they gritted their teeth and/or shrugged
their shoulders, and they "dollarized"— switched to
using the US dollar as their national currency.
So I guess they rounded up worth/value in some form, then econo-magic
happens, and then it became represented as a big number in a
bank account in the US. And then it gets to be time to
cash some of it out, so that people can exchange Ecuadorian
money-units (sucres) for US dollar bills and coins to do
business with. But it's like if you are in front of a
bank teller and they ask how you want it, what mix of ones,
fives, tens, twenties, etc?
And the Ecuadorian guys ordered up so many crates of
hundreds, so many of twenties, this many cargo containers of
quarters, and... Oh hey, didn't you guys make some kinda
brassy-goldy-colored $1 coin? Yeah,
somebody didn't like them, "unwed single mother!!" or
something. We want those. How many do you
want? How many ya got?
«While it seemed awfully strange to be
withdrawing dead presidents from an ATM high in the Andes, I
was even more perplexed by the monetary figure most prevalent
on Ecuador's streets. It wasn't Washington, Lincoln or
Jackson, but rather Sacawagea, the young Shoshone Indian
guide. I hadn't seen a Sacagawea gold coin back home for
a long time and now I knew why. Half the coins— 500
million of them— had been shipped off to Ecuador after
dollarization.»
Now... why get a half billion Sacagawea coins?
Well, the US paper dollar generally falls apart after a few
years of handling. But especially: it just looks weird,
with all the 19th century swirls and filigree, and besides
the obligatory president with a vague "am I lost?" expression,
it has a fucking pyramid whose top is missing and is
replaced by a giant eye peering through a glowing whole in
space itself. You want to buy a Snickers but
instead you get Osiris eating your soul!
* * *
And now consider the alternative, from general
aesthetics, as well as the aesthetics of the Ecuadorian
man-in-the-street:
Even forgetting exactly who that is and what she did,
I think that an Ecuadorian— or mostly anyone,
from any place and time in human history going back at least
ten thousand years— would look at that picture and
think: A normal-looking person.
Sign me up for being able to pull money out of my pocket
and seeing— beside the weirdoes and weird buildings and
Stargate pyramids— a normal-looking person looking up
from a coin.
Things we can never, ever have in the united states because of blind yahoo prejudice: socialized medicine, and a dollar coin.
And while Sacajaewa is still being minted, at a microscopic rate (twenty percent of a vastly reduced minting program for dollar coins) we're also doing a horrible presidential head series, which takes up the other 80% of dollar coin production:
It's been going on for a couple years already and I have yet to run across even one of them. I mean, they're already up to William Henry Harrison.
Unfortunately the graceful portrait of Sacajawea has been slightly redone as of 2009 and doesn't look as good to me. And the reverse has been changed to a poorly-executed series on 'native american contributions.' Look at that goobery freeware font:
Also, I think this is funny - our cent coins don't have digits on them, so Ecuador didn't take any of those, and instead minted their own 'centavo' coinage.
That is really surprisingly true. Entire social movements
have come, succeeded,
and gone, and we still don't have a dollar coin,
just abortive attempts at them.
"Because the stakes are so low" etc etc.
Speaking of which, I have never heard a verifiable
first-source attribution for "the reason the [fighting in
some domain or other] is so fierce is that the stakes are so
low". I've heard Kissinger, I've heard Mark Twain,...
I'm tempted to just lie and say from now on that it's from
the Iliad, or somewhere in the Brittanica-sized Pali scriptures.
The other day I was wondering what
similar folk would think about
my cuddly cognominal,
entrepr'murderer William Burke.
I mean, he was just trying to trim the welfare rolls,
while turning a profit. Ross Perot Overdrive. And he worked his way
up– a very extremely true Horatio Alger story!
Also: a successful member of the booming
medical-industrial complex.
Atlas shrugged, spurted blood out of his jugular, and fell forward and into a
big canvas sack.
Dollarization in Ecuador happened back in 2000 (well, it was a gradual process, but if memory serves, September 2000 was the drop-dead date for "bring in your sucres now or burn them for warmth tomorrow").
You can find people in Ecuadorian open-air markets selling old sucre bills and coins as curios at preposterous rates. The current president, an utter Hugo Chávez fanboy and wannabe, keeps talking about undollarizing the economy, but i think it's more of a "shiny thing" for his followers than as an actually desired policy change. It would be a mess, to say the least, and of course there's no reason for it other than antipathy towards the USA.
You sure know a lot about Latin American politics, at least
relative to me, and I know nothing, but congratulations anyway,
and thank you for the backstory.
By the way, how did you stumble on this entry of mine?
I am always
oblivious and surprised at the many means that people manage to do that.
2009-03-09 (Monday)
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