Numismatics corner!

I was recently discussing the trend in the United States to name our most visible assets for presidents and only presidents. I assume part of it comes from the Great Reagan Renaming of the late 1990s. But the stupidity has only grown.

Basically, every new aircraft carrier is going to be named for a president. Including the new U.S.S Gerald R. Ford class of supercarriers. (Incidentally, I know of no capital warships named for former Ohio State players). Although I think I foresee a problem when the George H.W. Bush and the George W. Bush get their orders crossed and make a Three Stooges-style entrance at the Straits of Gibraltar.

We've long been remiss in honoring great Americans on our currency, leaving it to a couple great presidents, a few horrible ones, Alexander Hamilton and Ben Franklin. And, of course, Sacagawea.

But she's getting hustled out the door, apparently in the belief that the reason no one wants to carry around pockets full of jingling dollars is because they don't have former presidents on them. And oh, are the new dollar coins are going to show presidents. All of them, in fact. Including, yes, two separate coins for each Grover Cleveland administration.

So we'll be honoring Rutherford B. Hayes, Andrew Johnson, Millard Fillmore and William Howard Taft, in the same way we honor Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson and the like. But other Americans can go suck a lemon. Would it kill us to put Martin Luther King on the currency? And not as a sop to multiculturalism or Black History Month. Dude pretty much changed the course of American history, and for the better. While Benji Harrison rocked the tariffs pretty hard, I don't think that quite compares.

But I'll let this issue drop for now. We're an increasingly unthinking, people. So I suppose its only fair that we make no distinctions other than that leader = good. I do have one other minor objection, and it's a question of taste. This requires visuals.