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 What Are You Looking At, Andrew Jackson? Even when spinning out of control, the 7th president is still staring at your ass. By Joshua Albertson | When you spin a freshly minted $20 bill, Andrew Jackson's right eye stares straight ahead as the rest of his long, dour face and his wild hair succumb to the motion and blur. Andrew Jackson probably had a similar look in his eye in 1806 when he killed Charles Dickinson in a duel for calling his wife ugly. I bet his head was spinning then, too. I'm not exactly sure when and where I learned that our 7th President could do this trick without getting dizzy. I think I was at a bar waiting to buy a beer, spinning my twenty (left thumb on one corner, right middle finger on diagonally opposite corner) to pass the time. Or maybe I was in my apartment waiting for the Chinese food to arrive. I was almost certainly waiting to pay for something; if not, I'm at a loss to explain why I was playing with Andrew Jackson. I tend not to play that way with people who favor dueling as a way to settle accounts. The details of discovery aside, I am not always able to replicate this trick. It requires a crisp bill; a flat, smooth surface; and loose and nimble fingers. After a handful of failed attempts to pass along my findings to friends (okay, watch this -- oh, for Pete's sake, it worked last time), I have determined that the confluence of these requirements is more rare than one may think. Nonetheless, I promise you, I have looked into the eye of a spinning Andrew Jackson and he has looked into mine. Of course, there are other stories of famous dead people staring at unsuspecting admirers. In 1996, when I visited the Louvre I stood with the crowd watching Mona Lisa, hoping she'd watch back. I stared for a few minutes, on tip-toes, and eventually convinced myself that she was looking at me. "Wow, those eyes," I might have said. Regardless, Mona Lisa has never been President. And, though I don't know much about art, I know enough not to try to spin the Mona Lisa. And frankly, I don't care much for that painting anyway. Now, Andrew Jackson, "Old Hickory" to friends, he was President all right. He was so much the President that some called him "King Andrew I." And he's probably sitting in your wallet or pocketbook right now, staring coolly with his best eye. Maybe he's looking at your ass or sifting through your makeup. Well, don't try to run. Don't try to spin around fast. Definitely do not mock his wife. You can't escape those Tennessee eyes - or, rather, that one, sparkling, right Tennessee eye. You might try to get rid of him by exchanging him for some moo shu pork and chicken fried rice. "Keep the change," you'll say, glad to be free. Silly friend, it's not that easy to slip the tenacious stare of the man who threatened to hang John C. Calhoun in 1832 when South Carolina undertook to nullify the tariff. After the delivery man leaves, you'll reach down into your pockets and realize you've got another AJ hugging your thigh. You can wish you ordered some sesame chicken and a couple of egg rolls, too, but you would just be delaying the inevitable. He'll be there next time you go to the ATM. You'll hit the button that corresponds to a $60 withdrawal and it won't be a $60-bill that comes cascading out of the money slot. It'll be ol' Andrew, lips pursed, hair waving, eye blazing. What a rascal! I'm glad Andrew Jackson's no longer living. It's not that I would ever have wished the 7th president dead. But now that I've looked into his eye, seen him stare back, I prefer him dead. It would be too weird having a living man stare like that. Jackson didn't used to stare - not on the old twenties. What happened? I'm fairly sure it has something to do with his positioning on the bill. At the risk of reviewing what you already know, Andrew's face was small and centered on the old currency. Sometime in the stylized-currency '90s, he was enlarged and shifted to the right. His left eye, rendered secondary by a slight turn of his head to the left, now sits almost directly in the center of the bill where it is subject to the wear and tear of the fold. The right eye, dominant and safe from folding (both single- and double-folds), is free to sparkle and stare, even when the rest of the face is spinning out of control on a bar top or your kitchen table. I'm sure there's a scientific reason for this spinning-staring -- something about centers of gravity or angles of perspective -- but I'm not really interested in that. And there might have been similar spinning-staring transformations to the mugs on the new $10 bill (another dueler, Alex Hamilton) and the new $5 (another long face, Abraham Lincoln) as well, but neither of those men can put the fear of God in a currency trader like AJ can. That bottom line is this: Early in his life, Andrew Jackson was nearly ruined when he accepted some bank notes during a business transaction. Turns out it was Monopoly money or something. Well, that was enough to turn him to gold, a man's currency. Later, with some Presidential authority in his pocket and bad memories of pink hundred-dollar bills in his mind, he burnt down (metaphorically) the Second Bank of the United States, America's central bank and a tool of the eastern elite. "The bank is trying to kill me, but I will kill it," is what he said. I don't think killing's on Jackson's mind any more. He seems a little mellower, what with those wrinkles and that zany-professor head of hair. But I do think he has something to say. I think he's tired of all of these bills changing hands. He's worried about our reliance on paper money. He probably thinks it will undermine the republic by allowing debt and fueling "a spirit of speculation," and that it will make people want to "amass wealth without labor," as he did think two centuries ago. "It grows on trees," he might add today. Or maybe, "It rips, you know." In any case, what I think he would be getting at -- what he is getting at with all of this staring -- is that Green is bad. Gold is where it's at. Of course, that doesn't leave us much room to maneuver, monetarily at least. Surely we cannot nickel and dime our way, so to speak, to beer and Chinese food. But there is an answer, a way out, and I think Andrew would be leading the charge to this exit. I think he'd want us all to turn our allegiance to Sakagawea, pioneer of the Continental Divide -- later to allow Jackson's political descendants to realize their Manifest Destiny -- and star of the new $1 coin. Self-reliant, not paper (technically), and still able to spin on a bar. Jingle, jangle. |
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