IT STINKS. Of all the qualities of the ubiquitous dollar bill-the slightly greasy texture, the elegant scrollwork, the bored-looking George Washington peering out from his majestic center perch in obvious search of amusement or simple diversion-the one rarely mentioned is the most insistent: A dollar bill can stink.
It can reek. It can smell to high heaven.
Sniffed vigorously, a dollar generally yields one of two primary odors, both of which are foul: either a snippy, astringent poke in the nose from a sleek new bill or a musty, fusty, moldy olfactory assault from an old one. The prickly nasal slap of fresh-mown hay or a foggy jab from Grandpa’s attic. An insinuating newness or an icky antiquity.
All dollar bills stink. They simply stink in different ways.
The great unsung monetary miracle, however, is that given this unpleasant reality, we still carry dollars around with us. In fact, we adore them. We file them in wallets and stack them on tabletops and give them as tips and fold them in envelopes and crumple them in trouser pockets. We’re entranced by the dollar bill.
Let the wisecrack wither in your mind before you even bother to utter it:
Well, ‘course we love dollar bills, Keller; money has a way of making lotsa friends real fast. Terrific insight, kiddo.
But that’s not what I mean. I’m not talking about the love of money. I’m talking about the love of dollar bills, which is another thing entirely.
In his quirky, appealing little book “Greenback: The Almighty Dollar and the Invention of America” (Picador, 2004), Jason Goodwin notes that the dollar bill “glories in its weirdness.” He proceeds to explore the strange symbols and murky metaphors that blossom on dollar bills, the mysterious pyramids and suspicious-looking numbers and obscure slogans and engravers’ curlicues that tickle conspiracy theorists no end.
Beyond those surface details, though, there’s another aspect to the dollar bill that enthralls: the fact that it’s made of paper. And there is something infinitely satisfying about the feel of paper between your fingers. The rustle. The silky sleekness. The captivating crackle.
Even if dollar bills were blank-which would make the lives of counterfeiters a great deal easier, no doubt-and lacked all the fancy graphical gingerbread that keeps historians hopping, we’d still adore them. We’d still regard them with the slightly bemused fascination we reserve for completely familiar and comparatively easy-to-obtain objects that retain a faintly exotic flavor.
Naturally, I have a theory about why this may be so. Coins clank beguilingly in your change purse, but dollar bills-ah, dollar bills!-awaken in us our frankly atavistic love of all things made of paper, of handbills and handouts and receipts and bills of lading and theater programs and carbon copies and printouts and maps and scraps of paper and bookmarks and train schedules and tissue-paper wrapping and tattered love letters and memos and prescriptions and scratch pads.
This, I realize, constitutes a somewhat nutty and stubbornly contrarian stance, since the demise of paper has been inserted into the modern consciousness as deftly and definitively as a dollar bill into a Pepsi machine. Futurists like to yak smugly about the onslaught of a “paperless society,” brought on, of course, by a cavalcade of computers and an endless blizzard of digital info.
Funny thing, though: People still love paper.
And because we love paper, we love the dollar bill.
Paper money, I perversely maintain, perennially excites us because it’s paper: the thin, funky substance that over just a few short centuries became the enduring scrimshaw of human achievement. We recorded our story on the stuff.
A dollar bill isn’t simply another form of currency. Be it old or new, be it stiff and prim from having just been peeled off a fresh stack by a blank-eyed banker’s index finger, or be it as wrinkled and faded and soft and inviting as the face of a great-great grandmother bearing a plateful of warm cookies, a dollar bill is something exquisite. Something supple and wondrous.
Coins, as I’ve dutifully stipulated, are nice, too. Lots of people love coins. Coins provide the deeply gratifying feel of heft and bulk and substance. Drag a bag of coins along a stony road and you are aware of your elaborate fortune; your back aches, your posture suffers, your neighbors complain about the infernal racket from all of that clanking and scratching. Drag a dollar bill along the same road, though, and feel only that dollar bill’s essential flimsiness, only the fact that your stash could blow away at any moment and all you’d have to show for your trouble is an empty, grasping fist and a hollow heart.
And yet, for all of the tangible physical differences between, say, four fat quarters and a lowly, puny dollar bill, the dollar bill rules. The dollar bill captures your imagination in a way no shiny, showy coin ever could. When W.E.B. DuBois wanted to describe the wilderness of woe that we happen to call the world, he labeled it “this dusty desert of dollars and smartness.” Perfect.
Goodwin’s book goes on to explain how the dollar bill created America. Oh, to be sure, there were a few other things that came into play as well: There were bloody wars and fierce wills and democracy and capitalism and Thomas Jefferson and dumb luck. But the dollar bill, Goodwin argues, ought to come in for its fair share of the credit too-and the word “credit” is no accident.
“Launched on the promise that it was as good as silver or gold, paper money seemed to be the logical fulfillment of the American experience,” Goodwin writes. “However earnestly or plausibly the promise was made, it still remained a matter of faith, and such a faith in common purpose, in a wholesome future, in the bounty of God’s providence, in the righteousness of one’s fellow men, were just the beliefs on which this new country was being founded.”
It was a new currency for a new country-and more to the point, as Goodwin says, a new kind of country. Paper money was a revolutionary notion. Because it represented more than itself, it required people to trust in what they couldn’t see. It asked them to hold fast to what wasn’t actually there. It asked them to keep faith with their own potential. It asked them to believe. It asked them to be patient. It asked them to dream.
And it asked all of those things by means of a simple, humble sheet, a sheet whose colors are dirty white and lime green tailing away to lighter and darker hues throughout. By means of a reverberating rectangle of pure promise. By means of an object that, not insignificantly, is made of paper.
The smart money says that money is getting smarter all the time, that soon we’ll all be mashing buttons on our computers to move our cash around. The dollar bill will be a museum piece, a relic, an anachronism that makes the old folks smile with gentle reminiscence and the young tykes gape with wonder: You mean people paid for things with those funny little scraps? But why?
I don’t know how many discretionary dollars currently reside in your pocket, but my advice is: Don’t bet on it. Don’t, that is, wager that the dollar bill is doomed, that paperlessness is the coming way, that money will become just a series of numbers on a computer screen, rows and rows of flashing digits. Symbolic fortunes. Ephemeral billions, shifting around like restless fish in a tank.
Instead, bet on the dollar bill, on its past and its future and, most of all, its feel. Bet on the rustle. Bet on the texture of a couple of folded-over dollar bills when you’re 8 years old and on your way to the comic-book store. Bet on the gigantic seething mass of America, a country whose promise is encapsulated in an odd little piece of paper that frames an irritated-looking presidential head.
Bet on the smelly dollar bill and on the people who, against all reason and logic, continue to carry it in their pockets. And in their hearts.
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jikeller@tribune.com
