This sheet is a classic Digger parody of civic reform language, recasting money itself as a social toxin and then proposing, with deadpan seriousness, a thirty-day campaign to rid the city of it. By calling money an “unnecessary evil,” addictive, corrupting, and productive of violence, the piece turns conventional public-safety rhetoric inside out, while its warning about hoarded wealth on Montgomery Street gives the satire a distinctly San Francisco target. The joke, of course, is inseparable from the Digger principle behind it: money is not simply to be condemned but released, redistributed, and stripped of its frozen power. In that sense, the sheet is both mock proclamation and real provocation, using humor to expose the unnaturalness of accumulation and to imagine the “free flow of energy” in place of financial control. |