Round about ...

[calimac]

Stayed up amazingly late on Friday working on my Inklings chronology. This is actually a huge database of citations from books and unpublished mss. that I compiled ten years ago and have been keeping up-to-date as material is newly released or published, new reminiscences are written, etc.

What I'm trying to do now is boil it down to a reasonable size that can be published in a book that's due out next year. This is not easy. Especially as there's an amazing number of misconceptions about the Inklings' history out there (starting with "they read their manuscripts in the pub" - no they didn't), and I'm determined to correct all of them.

Saturday: up finally, and off to the hidden city of Gondolin for a Potlatch committee meeting. We assigned a hotel liaison, and commissioned him to go off and drop that ring into the volcano. Schedule calls for us to have a contract negotiated before the end of the month, and a PR with Book of Honor and everything else ready by mid-August. Yes we know we're late. Circumstances got us started late.

Two hundred years ago today:
Lewis and Clark have crossed what will someday be the Nebraska state line. It's hot out. One sentry falls asleep on duty. They will not learn until two years later, on returning home, that today Vice President Dick Cheney Aaron Burr kills former Secretary of the Treasury Paul O'Neill Alexander Hamilton in a duel.

Poor Hamilton. Never a President of the United States (contrary to popular opinion, he wasn't ineligible - though foreign-born, he was "a citizen of the United States at the time of the adoption of this Constitution" [Art.2, sec.1, par.4] and therefore covered), he created the federal banking system and is therefore more worthy of commemoration on our currency than a lot of the Presidents who are pictured there: particularly Andrew Jackson, who - for reasons that seemed to him good and sufficient at the time - spent much of his presidency trying to dismantle the federal banking system. Jackson would probably be alarmed to find his visage depicted on a Federal Reserve Note.

So why is there a movement to remove Hamilton from the underutilized $10 and replace him with Ronald Reagan, who like Jackson did not exactly consider himself a friend of large federal bureaucracies like the one that issues these notes? Better to replace Jackson if one must do anything.

Comments

[sturgeonslawyer.livejournal.com]

There is also, God help us, a movement (albeit not a very strong one) to add Reegan to Mount Rushmore. I think perhaps better we should create a new monument to Nixon, Reagan, and Cheney. They deserve each other. Call it Mount Spiro.