JACK NEWCASTLE SAYS,
 Meredith Willson had it right. ‘Credit is no good to a notions’ salesman,’ he wrote for the opening of The Music Man, and it's the chug-chug rhythm of the Rock Island Line that propels the chorus into its maniacal demand for cash. ‘Cash for the merchandise. Cash for the buttonhooks. Cash for the noggins and the piggins and the firkins.’ The four salesmen pound, bellow, and rave, and though I still haven't the foggiest notion of what a noggin, piggin, or firkin could be, I do know the men have every right to ask for their payment in cash.
 Cash on the barrelhead. It’s what every seller wants, what every customer should pay, and what every oily banker in the world is doing his best to stop. The usurers, the bottomfeeders, the financial privateers – they’re all lobbying for this move to a cashless society because with all that untraceable lucre still about they know they won’t be getting their cut on all the smart transactions. They know that the kid with a dime in his pocket is going to walk into a candy shop and pay cash for that stick of gum, and it galls them to think they’re losing .003 cents on the deal. So what do Amex and Visa do to combat the enemy? They use psychological warfare, filling the public with nutty ideas about easy installments and membership benefits to wean it off mother cash and conveniently shove their own gelatinous teat of credit down its throat.
 And just remember, if these sharks have their way - if they entirely eradicate money - we’ll not only be at their mercy, we’ll even lose part of our cultural identity. After all, without cash, what are we supposed to throw in a hooker's face'? How are we going to degrade our game-show contestants if we can’t stick them in man-sized plastic booths full of air-circulated C-notes? And, Good Lord, what about the children? Yes, think of the children! How are we supposed to inspire them with the magical awe of the universe if we haven't a shekel to remove from their polluted ears? For to believe cash is nothing else but a method of mercantile exchange is to strip ourselves of a national, nay, a human bond. Cash, since its inception, has factored in to our hopes, fears, and dreams. It is part of our collective conscious-ness. Don't we all cringe at the end of Ocean’s Eleven when the millions are burned up with a better way of life? Yet we alternately laugh when the two-hundred-and-fifty gees are dispersed to the wind in It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. Credit, on the other hand, is neither heart-breaking nor funny. Credit is nothing but cold logic, and what will our national treasures, the screenwriters, do when cash is gone and there is nothing but credit to be had? Are we doomed to an eternity of heist pictures where egghead hackers simply punch in a few numbers to steal digital millions? Must we continually suffer montage scenes of flashing integers to indicate the oh-so-exciting transfer of funds to Swiss bank accounts? Audiences don’t want any of that that; they want armed guards moving great big bags of cash. They want armored trucks stacked with mouth-watering hundreds. Okay, granted, we really don’t need to sit through another of those scenes where the drug-lord in the meth lab hands money to the coke-tooting beyotch who sassily places it in an automatic counter while the undercover cop sidles off down the hall to see what’s behind a mysterious door but when he gets there he’s caught by the underling who asks what he’s doing but the cop is quick on his feet and says he’s just looking for the toilet and the underling tells him the toilet’s not where he’s looking for it and then rather good-naturedly waves his gun to where the toilet really is and the cop thinks he’s fooled the underling but the underling is still suspicious and directly reports the snooping to the drug-lord and the drug-lord says to keep an eye on him before he turns back to the beyotch who is done counting the money and then just as sassily says ‘It’s all there,’ but if such cinematic clichés must be endured to preserve the sanctity of money, then all I can say is pass the popcorn and fire up the projector.
 The importance of legal tender, of having the right to keep it in your wallet or to throw it in the face of a hooker, cannot be understated. Join the rebellion against financial enslavement: the next time you buy your firkins, make sure it’s with cash.
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MATT DECKARD SAYS
 Anyone can argue that cash is king. Just open your wallet and you’ll see greenbacks you can’t live without. They can be handed to the maître d' of a fine restaurant as a tip or given to a salesman in trade for a comb, but they are on their way out.
 It’s inevitable The average lifespan of those filthy paper bills that represent credits in the system is less than a year. As they are distributed and traded from hand to hand and worn to a shred of paper, that the banks must return for destruction, the government is tasked to refresh the supply by spending several cents apiece to churn out replacements to be sent out and shipped back again. This ritual is making less sense in a society that is moving away from carrying a week's earnings in its pockets in order to get around town. The plastic card is taking over and will someday be replaced by a device that just recognizes you and desires your approval… but that is getting ahead of my point. The paper dollar is becoming passé and will soon become an item that only those that like carrying interesting trinkets in their pockets will covet -- and good riddance. With the advent of the credit card, and now with the ability to pay directly from your bank from using a debit card, life has become sleek, fast, and free from fat wallets and clinging change. You no longer have to worry about whether you have enough cash on hand to cover the bottle of wine you ordered for your date at the local French Bistro. From meters in Beverly Hills that alert your cell phone that it needs to charge you again, to gas stations that let you swipe your card at the pump, to McDonald’s drive-throughs that just require you to hand them your card, we are moving away from the loose change in the cup-holder and the odd bill you left in that jacket you wore last winter. Sure that found cash is a bonus to your eyes but it’s interest un-accrued in a bank. Carrying cash isn’t just a hardship to the person but a hardship to the world as its shipment from bank to bank drains the fuel of ships and trucks that are filled daily with tons of copper and nickel and zinc that gets taken to mints and pressed pressed into quarters, dimes, and pennies that are immediately lost in couches or dropped into those jars in bedrooms. Paper that was once cotton plants and fields of trees filling the air with oxygen… and metals that form the wiring and infrasucture that makes our society function … All these ripped out resources have values that are unnecessarily drawn from the land and destroyed by tree cutting and mining that creates the units of currency that our hands turn to mulch and smooth faceless metal discs. Luckily for the little plastic card, time is running out for the cash system and the world will be a much better place when the paper dollar bill is just an image you can find on the internet of a currency that harkened back to the days when men carried a cart of animal pelts to trade for the weeks necessities.
 Pull out your card and bring on the champagne!
The card is the key to your account and like your car key, you don’t need to get a new one every time you run through your gas. It’s reusable and unique to you. It slides in your pocket creating no clanking sounds and no bulge. It can be handed to the waiter, cashier, bartender, shoe repairman, and pizza delivery guy without a pause or hesitation of it’s being real or fake. It can travel with you on a whim without having to be exchanged for different versions of itself that may exist in other countries. It is international and the de facto standard personal exchange device for the invisible units that keep the economy going, companies building, and dinner dates' glasses full. A synergistic device that comes out of your pocket extend, from your hand, then returns back to the pocket and allows you to be unchained from those untimely stops by the bank that always occurred after rummaging through your wallet for that 50 you thought you had. It’s the absence of pressure giving you the ability to stay home for weeks on end if you like placing orders for you and your girlfriend’s needs online or over the phone. The card is the culmination of millennia of human trading techniques placed into a small thin piece of plastic that is all you need to carry -- much easer than that cart of skinned deer your ancestor had to pull around town. |
