You’re Not Helping

I think it’s probably fair to say that things have been a bit weirder than usual around here since the last Presidential election, and given how weird life in these United States has gotten to be in this 21^st Century, that’s really going some. Life in this country is always a bit confusing right after a change in administrations, and this one is stranger than usual. A lot of things that “everyone knew” could never happen just did, and with the arrival of a “post-factual” society it’s getting harder every day to tell what is real, what might be real even though it makes no bloody sense, and what is just people acting out something they saw in a Saturday Night Live sketch. And while it seems unlikely that tomorrow will see either flights of angels with trumpets soaring over Washington D.C. or the entire city dropping straight into the Pit, some of the things people and organizations around the world are doing to celebrate the event aren’t making things any more believable…

Consider, for example, the story about a Russian company minting commemorative coins, in silver or gold, that bear the likeness of our President-Elect on one side and the legend “In Trump We Trust” on the other side. You can pick up the story from the CBS News page if you’d like, but so far it looks as if this one is correct. A Russian company called the Art-Grani Metal Works is striking a small series of 45 commemoratives, each supposedly about five inches in diameter and weighing about two pounds, although that should vary depending on the base metal. In addition to the aforementioned Trump portrait, the other side of each coin looks very much like the one on the back of the U.S. Presidential dollar coins, although carrying a different motto, of course. How much these “coins” will sell for, or rather if they will sell for more than the price of the metal, remains to be seen…

Now, we should probably acknowledge that this is a publicity stunt, almost certainly aimed at a Russian audience, rather than us. Even assuming that the company was making a large number of these coins, it’s difficult to imagine that there are that many people anywhere who would want to spend over $38,560 for a commemorative coin bearing the likeness of a U.S. president, no matter how controversial he or she happened to be. Even the silver coins would be a bit of a stretch at $545.92. But more to the point, perhaps, there are private companies all over the world, many of which actually have the word “mint” in their name, who produce gold and silver commemoratives featuring all manner of images of people and places all the time. The only reason this one is drawing attention on the Internet, instead of being relegated to the inside cover of a dead-tree magazine, is the momentary notoriety of its subject matter…

If the past 240 years are any indication, it seems probable that the new administration will be rather less wonderful than its supporters would have you believe, and possibly even slightly less horrible than its opponents are forecasting. If we are all very lucky, sometime in the very near future this whole passage will be left to the historians to figure out, and the rest of us can get back to trying to figure out what is fact, what is fiction, and what is something that somebody just pulled out of their hat. But on behalf of a generally confused American electorate, I can honestly say to the Art-Grani people, and all of the other companies like them, you’re not helping matters…