Bad or Good Penny?

The 2010 U.S. penny has something that looks like an acorn on its back-at the top it is inscribed ‘e pluribus unum’. ‘In many we are one’ might be regarded as a new world order zeitgeist of select financial elites. So much for free enterprise pluralism and individualism.

With luck Lincoln’s commemorative obverse is only a temporary, bad design. In some ways the Lincoln Penny’s Babylonian back suggests a new world order minting; let me explain…

I had become accustomed to the Lincoln Memorial classical building on the obverse of Lincoln’s penny established the past few decades. Then one summer day I occasioned to examine one of the strange shiny objects with the unfamiliar symbol and found that it was a transformed penny.

At first glance the art looks like a vast left-wing acorn. I guess it could be some sort of Union symbol for the 150th anniversary of the civil war to save the Union from recrudessecent global oligarchy, yet it is also implicitly a shield with a chevron-like figure at top. That sort of Army E-2 rank mosquito wing doesn’t suggest anything good.

Recently I learned something more about cuneiform-you know-those Sumerian-Babylonian writing and number symbols of 2600 B.C. with the style stick imprimtur used in mud tablets. I realized that the Army military ranking we use today for enlisted men/women and undeclared are all based on the Babylonian-Sumerian numbering cuneiform imprimatur for the number ten. It is a mosquito wing rotated 90 degrees.

The 360 degrees of a compass or circle and 60 minutes of an hour are also of Babylonian origin-yet disregard that for the time being.
The symbol for ten was rotated on its side for military purposes. One mosquito wing meant ten, two of the stripes represented twenty, three stripes thirty and so on.

The Babylonian mosquito wing also has a tiny diamond at its interior apex as if it anticipated a first sergeant’s status symbol.

Cuneiform stripes add up better as one reaches sergeant, staff, platoon sergeant etc with cuneiform coincidence of leader of respective numbers of units of ten. A squad is usually made of ten soldiers, a platoon of 40 to 60.

So what if America uses Babylonian stripes for its ranking system and as the chevron rank on the top of the acorn Lincoln penny backside you might ask-well perhaps it’s a Christian recalcitrance about Babylon the Great trading with all the nations of the world. Babylon has a bad end in the Bible, and all the nations actually cheer at her demise like the Chinese did when Al Qaeda took down the World Trade Center Towers in New York. It just seems like a bad penny with maladroit symbolism.

Maybe the military should change its ranking symbols and use something modern-numbers of catapults, space capsules, x’s and o’s, peace signs, pluses or minuses, lines, geodesic domes or atoms.

The United States’ war and political culture rebuilding for Iraq is estimated to cost about 3 trillion dollars by the time the real costs are in. The United States in its decade long Iraq policy drift began a new political policy era of global militarism as a political and economic cultural pacification device with borrowed money. It was a bad policy that made money for a contractual minority and failed to create long range stability without a counterproductive U.S. investment policy of ‘constructive’ engagement.

A Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff Mike Mullins advocated openly homosexual enlistees in the military. Open tolerance of sin seems in conflict with traditional moral norms. Some Christians at least might wish that U.S. policy aspires at least toward domestic policy harmonious with the will of God expressed in the Bible. Of course every nation must fall short of the moral perfection of Jesus Christ. The United States at least should try and do the best it can.

The net effect of the bad penny and associated national moral decay in politics presents the appearance of a drift toward Babylon the Greatism described in the ‘Book of The Revelation’ with the United States as political role player of the whorl of Babylon on the global stage. In my opinion it is not an intelligent role to play.

The back of Abe Lincoln’s penny should have an image of Mary Todd. If Lincoln had not had a wife the good times of his life would have been limited to getting positive body counts and good weather for burials in Robert E. Lee’s Arlington horse pasture or kicking a rock around the White House horse and buggy lot. His speeches would have been more grim, jokes and optimism absent and his staff kept busy taking notes on his eschatological hopes for the future. Lincoln might have envisioned solar powered, glow in the dark tombstones and hot selling advertising on them with scrolling lightening writing to pay for government funeral and burial costs in a somber, inspired mood.

If Mary Todd can’t go on the back of the coin, some sort of miniature math instruction cheat sheet series might be inscribed each year to remind Americans of basic math concepts and physics formulas.