Give Me Liberty Or Give Me Vegas

As a stamp collector, I appreciate the wonderful printing errors and design mistakes that have appeared on some of our stamps and made many of them collector's items. Examples of printing errors include the 1918 "Inverted Jenny" 24-cent air mail stamp that depicted an inverted image of a Curtiss JN "Jenny" biplane, the pane of which was sold at a Washington post office to one William T. Robey for a mere $24 - the most valuable property bought for that sum since Peter Minuit bought Manhattan from the Indians. How far back do you want to go for upside-down images? The 1869 pictorial stamps had inverted images of the paintings of Columbus landing in the Bahamas and the signing of the Declaration of Independence, as well as upside-down flags.

While such printings are honest mistakes of feeding the paper in the printing press the wrong way, design errors are less excusable because the artists hadn't done their homework. Two separate U.S. stamps, issued in 1928 and in 1977, showed Washington praying at Valley Forge; there's no evidence that he did so. A 1944 stamp honoring the completion of the transcontinental railroad shows the golden spike ceremony in Utah with a flag flying in one direction and the smoke from a locomotive blowing in the other.

But these design errors are nothing compared to the latest doozy. A definitive first-class stamp depicting the Statue of Liberty that was just issued shows not the actual statue in New York but . . . the replica at the New York New York Casino-Hotel in Las Vegas.

This seems all too appropriate for the United States, where history and tradition are routinely fictionalized and reduced to theme park values. We are unable to tell what's real and what's false anymore. So, just as many Republicans accept the idea that President Obama may have been born in Kenya, just as Jon Kyl can make a charge against Planned Parenthood with phony statistics on their abortion business (it's three percent of their entire business, not the ninety percent Kyl said it is) and declare through a spokesman that his statement wasn't intended to be factual, just as housing developments include fake storefronts to approximate the look of a real small town, so a stamp with a fake version of a real landmark gets issued and no one even notices . . . until it's too late.

Don't go out and buy this stamp expecting it to be replaced and become a rarity. USPS spokesman Roy Betts defended it, saying, "We still love the stamp design and would have selected this photograph anyway." Betts did tell the New York Times that the Postal Service is "re-examining our processes to prevent this situation from happening in the future."

Yeah, right.

I only hope that when Independence Hall is included on a stamp again, the Postal Service depicts the real one in Philadelphia, not the fake one anchoring the "Independence Mall" shopping center outside Wilmington, Delaware.

This is the fake Independence Hall, for the record. Were you fooled?

And how are we going to solve our most pressing problems when we're bombarded by distortions of reality on a regular basis?

Admittedly, one could argue that the fake Statue of Liberty in Las Vegas is no less kitschy than the real one, an oversized, multiple-scale statue with a torch that lights up - which has also inspired very bad mime artists in Battery Park - but that's another post.