A morning at Hart’s looking at prices and buying groceries. Everything costs more, a pound no longer has 16 ounces, but there’s no shortage of choices. My choices fit into two bags: the bill was $62.35 which I paid with a hundred-dollar bill. My two bags, my dog, and I returned home glad to be there while the temperature was under ninety. But all day I have thought about that hundred-dollar bill.
A hundred dollars buys little in 2026 and probably will buy less as the year passes with no reduction of tariffs or the presidential war in Iran. That piece of currency, that 100 dollars, doesn’t come close to what Trump calls peanuts, but that has not always been the case. The nice thing about being so wonderfully old is that memory goes back a long way to the first time I actually held a 100-dollar bill in my hand.
I have no memory of how I got it – I was working part time at two jobs, going to school part time: rent was $45, tuition was $21 a credit and books cost very little. But there I was with a hundred-dollar bill, and I didn’t know what to do with it.
I felt powerful, that I remember. I thought of shopping at the jewelry store in the Wilma Hotel (the fanciest in town) to buy a wristwatch and pay for it with a hundred-dollar bill. I thought of taking a friend to lunch and finding that the cashier couldn’t cash a hundred-dollar bill. I thought of surprising the owner of Rudy’s News with a hundred-dollar deposit so I could buy books without checking my wallet.
I thought of dozens of ways to spend that money and with each scene I felt a surge of power, of superiority, of entitlement. I don’t remember what I actually did with it – probably paid rent a couple months ahead – but to this day I remember what that bill did to my sense of who I was and what I could do in my world. It was just money but with that bill in hand I felt powerful in ways that had nothing to do with my mind or soul or humanity.
It’s that last sentence that echoes these days when billionaires occupy the White House, SNAP programs are abolished, and Medicaid refuses healthcare to those with little money. This might be argued as a natural outcome of a capitalistic economy. Our purpose is to make and spend money. Some people inherit money, some are better at making money, some are better at accumulating in illegal ways, some are all three—the single goal of a capitalistic society is to make money. If you make millions or billions, you are powerful, superior, entitled… and must work hard not to believe it.
This is, I think, a conundrum that faces politicians when they win elections and move into the power and money stuffed Washington D.C. Until then, most politicians have had limited experience with Power and Money in capital letters.
Now they do… and they become versions of that young Montana woman with her first hundred-dollar bill. By the second or third term, there is no connection with their younger self who argued for the rights for their constituents. They don’t visit their constituents because they no longer have anything in common.
Leading up to their own re-elections they will spend millions on advertisement but nothing for a round of coffee and conversation at the Ozark Cafe. They are afraid to ask the voters what the voters need because the answer may be counter to what they have agreed to in order to have more money and power for themselves… and having once agreed with the fascist-in-chief president there is no going back.
I suspect most neophyte politicians are not cynical. They believe they will help the country. Few withstand the pressures of money, fame, and power for themselves, not for the good of the country. Liz Cheney, Bernie Sanders, A.O.C., Jimmy Carter, G. W. Bush, Claire McCaskill – there are more voices not overtaken by the seductive “me, mine” stench that rises off piles of money.
Those voices need to be recognized, the others voted out to fondle their riches on their own thrones.
Mortals that we are, we cannot “take it with us” but we can do a lot of good with it and feel the equally seductive surge that comes with helping others… beginning with buckets of Tarmac to fill the hole in the left track leading to the drive-in window at Smith Drug.
Haha! That left track, for sure, Marie. But you are so right about politicians. We have some good ones to keep, but few here. If they can’t visit you for coffee at Ozark Cafe, if they can’t have staff answering the phone and responding to letters, why are they there? Oh, I remember. They meet with their big donors.