George Washington Is Cash Money

by Cory O'Brien; Illustrated by Soren Melville

  and every time he does a thing

  it seems to be with the explicit idea

  of pissing off as many Italians as possible.

  So O’Banion dies, obviously

  (in his flower shop, it’s way cinematic)

  and all his guys are like “Awesome

  we were looking for an excuse to kill everyone.”

  So now dudes are just shooting each other all day

  every day

  in the street, downtown, at like noon.

  Dudes die in restaurants and bowling alleys

  in the business district or wherever.

  So many dudes die in barbershops

  that barbers start facing the seats toward the door

  just so gangsters won’t be so freaked out.

  It’s a mess

  and Capone is having none of it

  so while he’s vacationing in Miami

  (and by “vacationing”

  I mean “being questioned by the cops

  as to how he got the money

  to buy a house in frikkin’ Miami”)

  he has a couple of his guys dress like cops

  and go to an auto garage full of O’Banion dudes

  and be like “Hey, guys, you’re under arrest.

  HAHA PRANKED

  WE’RE ACTUALLY SHOOTING YOU.”

  And to this day

  couples across the world celebrate this massacre

  every February 14

  by giving each other flowers and edible underwear.

  So at this point

  pretty much every single person

  who could possibly oppose Capone

  is dead.

  He is basically the mayor of Chicago.

  Dudes come to him like

  “Please, Mr. Capone

  could you ensure a fair and safe election?”

  and Capone is like “Sure

  it was me that was gonna make it unsafe anyway”

  and then the election is safe

  just because he said so.

  And once Al owns basically all of Chicago

  he can afford to be a nice dude.

  He’s constantly giving money to orphans and shit

  buying his mom nice houses

  giving whiskey to one-legged puppies

  whatever

  everybody loves this dude

  so finally the government is like “Shit

  we gotta make this guy look bad.

  But how?”

  The first thing they try

  is they name him Public Enemy Number One.

  This does not work at all

  because that is an objectively rad title.

  So then they hire this dude Eliot Ness

  and give him a big sack of money

  and they say, “Okay, dude

  make Capone’s life suck.”

  So Eliot Ness just drives around Chicago

  blowing up distilleries and filming it.

  But it turns out that Ness cares more about publicity

  than actually doing a good job

  so nothing he does actually results in a conviction

  (he does get a lot of movies made about him though

  and his dudes get nicknamed “The Untouchables”

  which might be a better name than “Public Enemy”

  but there’s no rapper named “The Untouchables”

  so it evens out).

  So finally the government gives up being cool

  and just does what it does best:

  It buries Capone in paperwork.

  Seriously, they spend five years

  reading ALL his financial records

  just to figure out how many taxes he’s not paying

  based on the solid idea

  that just because your income is illegal

  doesn’t mean you can avoid paying taxes on it.

  So they bust Capone for tax evasion.

  The Founding Fathers would’ve gone to war over this

  but Al Capone just goes to JAIL.

  They send him to Alcatraz

  which they pretty much opened just for him

  and he learns to play the banjo there

  but other than that it sucks.

  It especially sucks because Al is sick.

  Apparently a lifetime of banging whores

  can saddle you with certain inconvenient diseases

  like for example syphilis

  which Al has repeatedly refused tests for.

  BECAUSE HE’S TERRIFIED OF NEEDLES.

  This dude once beat two dudes to death with a bat

  and he will not have blood taken to save his life

  LITERALLY.

  Finally they figure it out though

  around the time his brain totally stops working

  and then they feel sorta bad for him

  so they let him out of prison

  and people pretend to respect him until he dies

  of pneumonia

  before the age of fifty.

  So the moral of the story

  is that when you’re running a criminal empire

  you should always use a condom.

  THOMAS EDISON IS A KILLING MACHINIST

  Did you think I forgot about electricity?

  Tsk tsk, friends

  what good is a pantheon without a god of lightning?

  Benjamin Franklin was all well and good

  FOR A WHILE

  but we needed someone to get modern with this shit

  so listen up:

  When last we left our heroes

  they were busy proving that lightning was electric

  and then going to France and having a lot of sex

  and apparently all this was crucial

  (especially that last part)

  because it opened the door for a dude named Faraday

  to come along and start making machines

  that rubbed shit on other shit

  with UNHEARD-OF EFFICIENCY.

  He also invented a kind of cage

  that makes your cell phone not work

  so basically he sounds like a dick

  BUT HE IS AN IMPORTANT DICK.

  History is full of important dicks

  like Alexander the Great

  and Napoleon

  and Benjamin Franklin’s dick

  but there are at least as many important ASSHOLES.

  Enter Thomas Alva Edison.

  See, after Faraday invents his super efficient method

  for rubbing shit together

  Thomas Edison gets very rich

  by selling crazy souped-up telegraphs

  and puts up a gigantic building in New Jersey

  so that he can more efficiently gather smart people

  and rub their brains together

  (as a side note

  I am currently pioneering a new theory of history

  it is called

  “everything in history as rubbing things on things”)

  and through the friction of all these smart brains

  Edison comes up with some pretty cool ideas

  or more accurately

  better versions of other people’s already cool ideas

  like lightbulbs and whatever

  and one of the things he comes up with

  is another way to generate and distribute electricity.

  Edison calls his way “direct current”

  (or DC)

  and the other way

  which is being pioneered at the same time

  by a dude named Westinghouse

&
nbsp; is called “alternating current”

  (or AC).

  Do not try to understand what these things mean

  it’s really hard

  all you need to know

  is they would make an incredibly sweet band name.

  So the problem with DC power

  is it’s lazy

  it won’t travel very far before it gives up

  so you gotta make tons of power stations for it to use.

  Meanwhile

  the problem with AC power

  is that someone has not yet come along

  who can upgrade it and make it TOTALLY RAD.

  ENTER NIKOLA TESLA.

  Tesla is this Serbian dude with like no social skills

  because he put all his stat points in CRAZY BRAIN.

  He willingly gave up rubbing his junk on ladies’ junk

  so he could spend more time rubbing electric junk

  plus he hallucinated like ALL THE TIME

  because he slept like NONE OF THE TIME.

  This dude was less of a dude

  and more of a streamlined engine

  for turning water and saltines into SCIENCE.

  So Tesla looks at AC power like “Okay, guys

  I see what you’re doing

  with the rubbing stuff on other stuff

  but guys

  what if we made it

  MORE COMPLICATED???”

  and everyone is like “AWRIIIIGHT”

  especially that Westinghouse guy

  so Westinghouse buys all of Tesla’s great ideas

  and then Edison is like “Oh man

  Westinghouse is about to totally wreck my shit.

  AC power can travel longer distances than DC power

  and it is cheaper and more efficient . . .

  Welp

  I guess there’s only one thing left to do:

  time to start murdering animals.”

  THAT IS, NO JOKE, WHAT EDISON DOES.

  First he invents the electric chair

  and powers it with AC power

  so everyone will know just how dangerous that shit is

  ignoring the fact that lightning can also kill people

  and I’m pretty sure that’s not AC OR DC

  ELECTRICITY:

  JUST PRETTY DANGEROUS ALL AROUND.

  But Edison doesn’t stop at fixing American justice

  no no no

  he starts stealing stray cats

  and frying those babies on his electro-kill machine

  but everyone is still like yawn

  so finally Edison is like “Fuck this.

  Just fuck this.

  I’m gonna get an elephant from the goddamn zoo

  stick an electrode up its butt

  and shock it to DEATH

  while filming it with another of my inventions

  and THAT is going to solve this whole thing for me

  I don’t see how it could fail.”

  So he kills Topsy the Elephant

  and then shows people the video

  and somehow

  that fails to convince everyone to buy his electricity

  but it’s fine, because it’s not like Edison is poor.

  He gets distracted pretty quickly

  by an ambitious scheme

  to repeatedly fire X-rays into his own eyes

  presumably in order to become more like Superman.

  Meanwhile, things are not going too well for Tesla

  because after a brilliant career of turning down ladies

  and sculpting reality with his mind

  said mind is finally like “Okay, I’m done

  it’s just gonna be martians and talking pigeons now

  all day every day”

  and Tesla is like “Oh well

  I guess I better go die in a tiny apartment

  after living on milk and crackers for months.”

  And once Tesla and Edison are dead

  from crazy and diabetes respectively

  everybody’s like “You know what

  why don’t we just compromise?

  We’ll use AC to get electricity into our houses

  and once it’s there we’ll turn it into DC

  and use it to make our toast and power our dildos”

  and that’s why pretty much every appliance you use

  needs some kind of DC converter on it

  so thanks a lot, past people.

  Now, guys

  I know you were expecting the standard narrative

  “Nikola Tesla invented radar and gravity and knees

  and Thomas Edison stole all of it

  with his asshole machine made of assholes”

  and while Thomas Edison is indeed an asshole

  and Nikola Tesla did indeed invent a million things

  what both of them have in common

  is being MEGA CRAZY.

  Like, from my perspective

  there is not a lot of difference

  between hallucinating pigeons and aliens

  and shooting yourself in the eyes with X-rays

  which just goes to show

  that all the smartest people in the world

  are secretly the biggest goddamn idiots.

  THE GREAT DEPRESSION WAS ACTUALLY NOT SO GREAT

  So back in olden times

  (by which I mean about a hundred years ago)

  all the great economies of Europe

  plus the United States of America

  had mad buxx

  mostly from exploiting Africa

  and Asia

  and South America

  and North America too, if you think about it

  so the combined wealth of all these continents

  is mostly focused on this one little tiny continent

  which only really gets to be its own continent

  because back when the Greeks were naming stuff

  they didn’t have satellites

  to tell them Asia and Europe are joined at the hip.

  ANYWAY

  these hella wealthy bros all worship the same god

  no, not God

  Nietzsche already told everybody that dude was dead

  the god I am referring to is called the Gold Standard

  and it has only one commandment:

  The amount of money you have in your country

  must equal the amount of shiny yellow metal

  that your country has found in the ground.

  It is a pretty arbitrary way to handle money

  but so far so good

  mainly because people keep finding gold in Africa

  so there keeps being more money

  which people are stoked about

  because they never want to stop buying things.

  But guess what?

  WAR HAPPENS.

  Yeah, some dude gets shot in Austria

  he’s named for the indie band that wrote “This Fire”

  and I guess that band is really big in Europe

  because his death makes everybody start fighting.

  They call it the Great War

  but it’s actually a pretty sucky war for everyone.

  Here’s why:

  War is way expensive

  and nobody really budgets for it

  so everybody’s economic strategy becomes

  “Let’s just win the war

  and then make the other guys pay for it.”

  But they still have to get the money in the meantime

  so they borrow it

  mostly from the United States

  but
also from Britain.

  The U.S. gets mad rich off of this

  and ends up with most of the world’s gold.

  But then everybody still doesn’t have enough money

  so what do they do?

  They just print more money.

  Being a government is awesome.

  The war goes on for four years

  and at the end of it, Germany loses

  the problem being that of all the guys in the war

  Germany was the MOST SURE it was gonna win

  so it borrowed/made up THE MOST MONEY

  and now Britain and France are like “Hey, Germany

  you need to pay us back all the money we spent

  you know, on killing you”

  and meanwhile the U.S. is like “Oh, hi there, guys

  you need to pay us back all the money we gave you

  you know, to kill Germany”

  and Britain and France are like “Okay, sure

  just let us get all that money Germany owes us”

  and Germany is like “Uhh . . .

  we don’t have this money.”

  So Germany can’t pay France and Britain

  and France and Britain can’t pay America

  because the Gold Standard says money = gold

  and America already has all the gold.

  But America won’t forgive the loans

  so Germany starts printing dumpsters full of money

  just to keep up appearances

  until one U.S. dollar

  is worth six hundred and thirty BILLION marks.

  There’s so much cash, kids are building money forts

  it is tragic/pimp as hell.

  Britain does convince America to go easy

  and lower the interest rates on the loans

  but in order to do that

  America has to lower ALL THE INTEREST RATES

  so everybody back in the U.S. is like “SWEET

  FREE MONEY

  BETTER USE IT TO BUY STOCKS”

  and they just go nuts

  the whole stock market goes completely bonkers

  shoe-shine boys are giving out hot tips

  hobos have stock portfolios

  and the dudes in charge are TERRIFIED

  because they know that at this point

  the market is just running on bullshit and dreams

  and real soon it’s gonna get to that part in the dream

  where you’re naked at your tuba recital

  and you never learned to play the tuba.

  There are other people who are like “NAW

  THE MARKET WILL BE GREAT FOREVER

  PUT ALL YOUR MONEY IN IT”

  but you know what those people are?

  WRONG.

  WRONG LIKE A DOG EATING MAYONNAISE.

  The market goes down like a clown