Yesterday, the Illinois State Highway Authority held a five-minute meeting to rename I-88 (the expressway that leads to Chicago’s western suburbs and beyond) the Ronald Reagan Memorial Tollway.
Considering we have a tendency to name our roads around here (I-90/I-94 is the Kennedy, I-290 is the Eisenhower, I-94 south of downtown is the Dan Ryan), I don’t have a big issue with this. Even the fact that part of Northwest Highway is already called the Ronald Reagan Highway (so named years ago) doesn’t bother me, probably because everyone calls it “Northwest Highway.”
Now people are lobbying to have Reagan put on our money, replacing someone like Alexander Hamilton (“he wasn’t a president”) or U.S. Grant (“what did he do again?”), and this really bugs me for a couple of reasons.

In the early days of this country, there was a movement to have George Washington’s face put on our money. George himself said “no” because putting his face on our currency “smacked of a monarchy.” And he was right, in my opinion. For that reason, we had a lot of Lady Liberties on our paper and coins.
Somewhere along the way, statesmen began showing up on our currency. I can understand the mindset of honoring our great leaders, but I think it’s gone far enough in terms of giving presidents face time on our money.
(I’ll say as an aside that the Susan B Anthony and Sacagawea dollar coins were a step in the right direction, even though nobody uses them.)
Other countries have famous citizens on their money, not just politicians. And the Euro doesn’t have people on it at all, just architecture. Check out this site to see what I mean.
This turns into a bigger issue for me, because I’m concerned about the fact that we have completely lost the perspective that the role of “politician” should be the role of ultimate servitude. The whole idea behind a democracy is that the people are supposed to call the shots in this country, and the individuals we elect to office are supposed to represent our interests.
I’m not na