Counterfeiter

Last summer a counterfeiter frequented the Rockland public library; at least twice I found the result of his/her/its work stuck in a book. The thrill of opening a book still unread was heightened upon discovering what looked like a $100 bill. I'm sufficiently money-conscious that it took me some seconds to realize it was a fake. It's now on our refrigerator door (where novelties and prophecies go).

A fake with faith, I should say. The color is about right, that distinctive green that makes the world go around, and the design close enough to get your heart going (the Lawrence H Summers signature as Secretary of the Treasury a particularly nice touch). But it's slightly smaller than the real thing, and the otherwise convincing back (Independence Hall) proclaims two Bible verses, John 3:3 and John 3:16, and on the front is printed "Jesus Loves You" once and "This is counterfeit but Jesus is the real thing" twice and where Ben Franklin should have been, a picture of a man, a modern Jesus perhaps, with neatly trimmed beard and haircut and a hint of a white oxford collar and a face looking suspiciously like Al Gore.

In these days of market meltdown, I'm re-evaluating my previous analysis of this prophet. Where last summer, in the beautiful weather and an economic sky whose only cloud was the price of oil, I might have discarded the person as your typical religious zealot, I now wonder if hesheit was trying to tell us some cold hard thing. Money wasn't really money anymore, it was figures on a computer screen. Last summer people were treating it as water, not wine. We didn't need to think about it, it just grew. It was in for a fall.

But it's the real thing now, and that's why the fake is still on the fridge door: Jesus and Al and Larry have come to save us from ourselves.