Thursday, April 21, 2016

Today in not by a long shot...

"I hope you enjoyed using my word,
incidentally, I take Paypal now."
Well of course he's not happy with Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill. It's like his job to be dissatisfied and to complain about things that are awesome. Who am I talking about? Why that hateful leathery goon running for the GOP nomination. I'm not going to mention his name anymore, because I'm starting to wonder if it doesn't help him. Like, every time someone types his name on the internet he gets a dollar, sort of like how George Lucas owns the word 'droid.' It might sound paranoid, but I wouldn't put it past him.

Anyway, the Tubman twenty thing. Smonald Schtrump came out and accused Treasury Secretary Jack Lew of bowing to political correctness when he finally announced that Harriet Tubman would be replacing Andrew Jackson on the bill:

The $2 featuring Thomas Jefferson.
Sure, he wrote the Declaration of
Independence, but what's he done lately?
"Harriet Tubman is fantastic, I would love to leave Andrew Jackson and see if maybe we can come up with another denomination. Maybe we can do the two dollar bill or we do another bill. I don't like seeing it, yes, I think it's pure political correctness..."

-Smonald Schtrump on how Harriet Tubman is
worth about one tenth of Andrew Jackson 

Pictured: Some guy.
Which, ok, first of all, let's be clear: no one cares what Schtrump thinks about this. He's not the President, he's not in charge of the Treasury. He might be running to run for President but right now he's just some guy. A rich guy with a distressingly huge following. Sure, he's managed to cobble together a coalition of Axe Bodyspray college bros and elderly white men who watch Fox News but he's not someone who's ever been elected to anything and he's not an historian so whatever.

Like most sausage festivals, women
 are disproportionately underrepresented. 
That said, he does have something approaching a point. Yikes, right? Putting Tubman on the twenty is kind of a political move. Of course it is, I mean, no matter who it is, the portrait on the money is going to have implications, that's the whole point. We could just spend paper rectangles with the dollar value printed on them, but that's boring so we stick important historical figures on them. Go ahead, open your wallet, it's like Schoolhouse Rock, and by that I mean it's a educational trip through the sausage fest that is accepted American history.

It's not political correctness, it's more like a political correction. That's why we're kicking Jackson off the twenty; we're trying to balance things out a little and frankly he was kind of an asshole. Nobody's talking about replacing Lincoln, everyone loves Lincoln. We're just taking a small, but important step towards recognizing that people who weren't landed white males also contributed to American history.
"This is an honor really, thank you, but you know it doesn't make up for centuries of slavery,
genocide and treating women like baby-making servants, right? Like, not by a long shot."

-Harriet Tubman (actual quote)

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