The Penny Outdated? Sigh. Maybe We are, Too.

NOTE: This is a re-send of Sept. 8 column to correct a grammatical glitch. Price of bypassing the copy desk.

By Fred Bruning

Sept. 8, 2024

      It’s exhausting, I know, but the penny thing has come up again.

      This happens occasionally when people take a break from worrying about the Mets farm system, sodium content of Impossible Burgers, and why anyone would bungee jump out of a helicopter over northern Arizona which, I have found, actor Will Smith did a few years ago to mark his 50^th birthday.

     Let’s pause a moment before discussing pennies and consider the bungee jump.

     Is there anything you’d be less likely to do?

     Pretend we are invaded by wicked extraterrestrial forces and some pea-green Torquemada says here are your choices, pathetic Earthling:

     You have to bail out of a helicopter and hope for the best, wrestle a 12-foot alligator during halftime of a Miami Dolphins game, or compete in a hot dog eating contest with Joey Chestnut who just won another title by nailing 83 franks in 10 minutes.

     While you’re thinking it over, here’s my answer:

     Grease up the gator, start boiling the dogs, but no way I’m attaching myself to an industrial-gauge rubber band and plunging toward the unyielding Arizona landscape, only to endure an abrupt bounce and then drop, headfirst – again! – toward some rocky gorge.

      I have not sought a thrill of even minor significance since riding (once, a long time ago) the Cyclone at Coney Island on the same night a girl named June and I went on the parachute ride, June, as I recall, happily pointing out the sights below, I, asking June to pay no attention should I grow faint and conk out on her shoulder, that most likely I would be all right back on the boardwalk.

       Are we modern people so at a loss for substance and exhilaration that we find it necessary to revive spirits by hurling ourselves out of helicopters over Navajo Nation?

      Ah, the power of ennui – malaise, boredom, by another word.

      And perhaps it was just this sort of chronic restlessness, the search for purpose in a period of uncertainty, that prompted the New York Times to run an urgent headline in the Sunday magazine demanding: “America Must Free Itself from the Tyranny of the Penny.” 

       Tyranny? The penny?

        In the story that follows – a crackerjack piece, for sure, by reporter Caity Weaver who carries off the assignment with good humor, deep research and plenty of zing – we learn that there is a kind of Catch-22 involving the humble coin bearing Lincoln’s noble head.

       Simply stated, most pennies are never spent which puts them out of circulation which, in turn, demands that the government produce more.

        But those pennies will not be spent, either, and, accordingly, the government, at some expense, will turn out another batch to languish – who knows where? – on night tables, mason jars, or, as counterweights in sash windows, as one reader noted online. “In other words,” says Weaver, “we keep minting pennies because no one uses the pennies we mint,”

       Ok, it’s nuts and costly, and a fine example of bureaucratic weirdness, but, no matter, I’m standing up for the penny.

       Here I am thinking of a day maybe in, oh, 1948, when Mom and I are walking along Sixth Avenue in Brooklyn, and maybe I had a chocolate cone from the great Droge’s ice cream stand, and suddenly, on the way home, we stop as though an asteroid had landed at our feet.

       “Freddie!” cried Mom. “Look, there – a penny!”

        Bending to pick up the treasure, I wondered what accounted for her excitement – nice, a penny, but, you know, not even enough for a pretzel stick at Becker’s candy store. 

         Mom and Dad had survived the Depression – barely. Finding a penny maybe was a small sign of good luck, cut-rate Kismet, a reminder that no matter how little, nothing must go to waste.

       “Keep it,” said Mom. “You’ll start a collection.”

        There is something captivating about things of modest denomination especially at a time when bigness is so revered – houses, cars, wall-sized television – and smallness seems outdated.

       Almost surely, the penny will not last much longer.  Weaver of the Times is correct – totally crazy to mint more coins to replace the ones no one uses in the first place.

       But don’t we do crazy things all the time?

       I wonder – does Will Smith stoop to pick up a penny?

NOTE: This is a re-send of Sept. 8 column to correct a grammatical glitch. Price of bypassing the copy desk.

 Previous Invisible Ink posts at: https://fredbruning.substack.com/archive