I have come to debase the coinage.
--Diogenes
1. I am wronged by the United States Mint, as are all those Americans who might have hoped that the "golden" coin stamped with a likeness of the Indian maid Sacajawea was meant not merely to inspire but to represent them, and who dared to believe by the close of the twentieth century that the Mint's worst work lay well in its past. Buffalo nickels, which seemed a denial of the fact that we had killed off most of the buffaloes and stocked our boutique ranches with the remainder, and their Indian Head faces, which likewise seemed to imply that we had never poisoned or starved or hung or gutshot the greater share of the Indians and ranched them out too, were themselves all but extinct and corralled in our grandfathers' dusty coin sets. Walking Liberty half-dollars were confined there as well, along with Standing Liberty quarters and varied treatments of Liberty's detached head. I assumed that the Mint had learned to hold itself to......
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