The Last American Penny

The Last American Penny


I am that I am[1]: the last American penny, an assortment of zinc and copper pressed into the image and likeness of my designers. I glance sideways at myself, carrying a symbol of upon my underbelly of democratic value. Yet, it is no soft parade for my ilk, no “gentle streets where children play,”[2] only the clang and clamor of countertops and piggy banks, activities which in short order have come to pass us and be gone. With 288 billion like me laying in pockets and ponds, my place—the place of the last American penny—will be the display case, an icon to an ideology peering out from history toward the furtherance of illusion.

Ideologies get tweaked with time: foaming up through decades to be empirically identified via their subscribers, settling down again to sleep in numbers and nostalgia. Valuable to those defining value, significant for a wish or two; or perhaps your baby teeth, I become invaluable only when the last of my kind passes through this languid epoch.

“Perfect,” the well-dressed man in spectacles and a white pressed shirt begins. “It is the law of supply and demand at work and you my friend have outlived your usefulness.”

He said, “Perfect.” The sister of omni-benevolence.

He said, “Supply and demand.” The magical law which spins the world.

He said, “Usefulness.” The axis on which a season finds its light.

The well-dressed man continues. “And to think a single one of you would get me a bushel of bananas across the sea or an audience for King Lear not so long ago.” He turns me over in his hand as I consider the last great savant of man:

“…there shall be no money; all shall eat and drink on my score; and I will apparel them all in one livery, that they may agree like brothers, and worship me their lord.” [3]

“Are the lawyers truly dead?”[4] I muse between his oily fingers. “Is there no chance for some of me to rub off on him, some piece that cannot be washed away with constructionist soap?”

I feel slick and impermeable, so masterfully held together that he would need ten-thousand fingers to the remove the first spec of me. Bananas, brooms, or abbot’s bottoms; no one can say anything about my placement save the one with whom I find utility, to which this aged collector most certainly exemplifies with showcased plans.

He said, “Across the sea.” Those pesky other countries for which he feels apt to judge my measure. Yet, there is more to me than them that use me, more to me than the shallow jelly jars in the back of the tent revival, more to me than the words in the Koran or the numbered gray hairs on his balding head, and more to me than this aged President to spend his days peering listless behind sealed glass with sanguine jaws.

“His knowledge must at least enable him to explain and account for what is, or he is an insufficient judge of what ought to be.” [5]

What ought to be. Indeed, who better the judge than the copper which man pitches gleefully toward false hope? Who better than the "least of these" in naked prisons and empty store shelves in foreign lands?

How alike we must be, the God in whom we trust and the last American penny! The faith that moves us from utility to spectacle, from one man’s brain to another’s active hands, from anecdotal definition to a daily efficacy is certainly no wider than a church door.

Buying and selling could just as easily be founded on the length of one’s toenails—what precisely is this terrible magic to which we are bewitched? Who needs the pressed metal, or the clamor of rudimentary, unverified economic law? Who needs the higher ideals of the divine? And why should any idea of man move its way from the appreciative gawk of shadows cast on cave walls toward the authenticated dream of men so embroidered in banks and steeples?

I am the geophysical manifestation of a belief. “I am that I am.”


[1] Exodus 3:14
[2] The Doors, “The Soft Parade” (1969)
[3] Act IV, Scene II
[4] Ibid.
[5] John Stewart Mill, Essays on some unsettled questions of Political Economy. Essay V: “On the definition of Political Economy”