Porn Caves to Bush

But as a righteous man, Tony Moreno was only doing the work of the Lord in keeping those Sodomites out of downtown Santa Ana. Because everyone knows that “arts” districts are synonymous with homosexuality, right? Who cares if that part of the city is about as attractive as Rush Limbaugh’s cyst? It’s deliciously ironic, albeit absolutely disgusting, that a corrupt politician would play the “sexual-preference card” to try to get off the hook, but this could well be a sign of things to come in the Dubya-Ashcroft era.

—Johnny Angel Queer Bill

For decades activists of various political stripes have been launching local currencies. By circulating within one community, the thinking goes, such a scrip would encourage people to spend their money close to home, thus fostering the area’s economy. Sometimes the idea takes off, and sometimes it doesn’t: A planned local tender for Santa Monica never seems to have gotten off the ground, while Santa Barbara’s currency is now on a “healthy hiatus,” according to organizer Bruce Bigenho. The project’s been suspended, Bigenho reports, until its participants can figure out a way to get people to “ascribe value” to the alternative bucks — i.e., to treat them like real money.

OffBeat wishes them luck, but our favorite such project isn’t in Southern California. It’s in Lawrence, Kansas, where the leftish Lawrence Trade Organization has been printing bills that bear the faces of Pélathé, the Shawnee scout who defended the city against Quantrill’s Raiders; Langston Hughes, who spent part of his childhood in the town; and — this is the coolest part — William S. Burroughs, the Beat eminence who lived his last years in Lawrence. The Burroughs bill, we feel, marks substantial social progress: Money art usually honors queens, presidents and other officially designated authority figures, not bitter individualists who despised lawmen and churchmen and anything that stank too much of order.

These days, local money tends to be promoted by mellow Green types. But if you trace the movement back far enough, you’ll find a fairly disreputable collection of often right-wing social critics who mixed their parochial economic views with intricate conspiracy theories. It thus seems appropriate that a local scrip would bear the image of Burroughs, an inveterate conspiracist whose broadsides against social-control systems walked a fine line between deliberate and unconscious metaphor.

On the other hand, it was Burroughs who once likened capitalism to drug addiction, comparing a poor man’s desperation for dollars to a junkie’s hunt for a fix. Of course, given the Lawrence Trade Organization’s ideological intent, the Burroughs bills may seem less like junk than like methadone.

—Jesse Walker