22 pens for one signature..!

Thursday, March 25, 2010

In U.S. whenever a new law need to be enacted, first the congress & senate vote on it to approve. It then goes to the president for signature. When the president signs the bill, it becomes law. Instead of treating the bill signing process simply as a procedure that need to be completed, they usually make a ceremony out of it. TV cameras record the event and broadcast it so that politicians can talk about the virtues of the newly enacted law and how it will help people. As part of this ceremony, the president gives the pen used to sign the bill as a memento to the individual(s) who worked hard for getting the bill through.

 

When a big bill like the health-care legislation gets signed, the ceremony becomes even more pronounced. With so many people involved in getting the bill passed, there are so many people who want the pen..! Solution? President signs the bill using multiple pens. :-) For the health-care legislation passed last Tuesday, there were apparently 20 people who deserved the thank you gift. President Obama wanted a pen for himself and they needed one more for a museum. So, he signed his name just once (see the picture below) using 22 different pens..! Individual pens were used to sign just a fraction of one letter in his name..! This sounded silly to me. I am not sure how many of these pens are going to end up in eBay in the next few years. :-)

 

Similarly there is a custom of sending the U.S. national flag that flies on top of the Capitol Building inWashington D.C. to dignitaries around the world as a memento. You can imagine how it would be nice for someone to own a flag that flew on top of that building for a whole year. But again, this idea need to be leveraged fully and so the system goes into "mass production". There are workers who tie a new flag to the pole, hoist it, let it fly for 5 minutes, pull it down, replace it with the next flag and repeat the process throughout the day..! This dilution again cheapens the idea for me. It would be much nicer to use just one pen for each bill and one flag per year and perhaps keep it in some museum if they need to be preserved.

 

Still treating such physical objects as treasures sounds similar to Bollywood movie fetish where heroes and heroins hold on to some clothing or hair clip, etc. of the loved one pining over it. I was quite amused few years back when the British Museum turned down a collection of her used hand bags ex-PM Margaret Thatcher tried to donate suggesting that they should be displayed as treasured exhibits. :-) To a small extent I can see some symbolic value in preserving one pen used to sign a big law that touches the lives of several million people. But used personal handbags..?!?!