 It was the most naked, I think, and cranked description of the gold standard position. You can't substitute paper for the real thing. An idea can't be a thing. A thing has to be something material. But of course, in fact, it's an economy where a house-in-lot is just a piece of paper. And in fact, the ownership of the house-in-lot is purely a fictional paper title. Ownership doesn't exist physically. It only exists in law. It only exists in custom. And for the purposes of the market, a paper representation of a house-in-lot is exactly as good as a house-in-lot. And so that was sort of interesting to me. The cow, obviously you can't milk a piece of paper, but you can buy and sell symbolic cows, which are nothing more than pieces of paper. And from the perspective of the greenbackers, the money itself is an embodiment of all these other tangible physical goods, which are part of the United States. So it seemed like a nice way to get at both a really strong expression of the gold standard position and some of the incoherences of it at the same time. The first thing I'd ask him is why did he choose to make paper money into a rag doll? What are the rhetorical strategies of this thing? And the claim that paper money is a rag baby is an interesting claim to make. Why does he choose to symbolize it that way? Why not call it a scarecrow? Why a rag baby? And then I'd ask, why would he want to have it in the form of this weird impossible situation of shelf with signs put around it? I mean, I would want to ask them why the argument takes that form. And I'd get them to say, well, maybe it has something to do with the commercial street and the world of signs and advertising. If I had to describe a methodology, I would say you have to have some factual context. You have to understand why certain terms appear. You have to know what's going on in the era that the document appeared in. But beyond that, you want an attitude of skepticism about the rhetoric, about the strategies of argument that the document makes. You want to be able to question not just the points the argument makes, but the means by which the arguments gets there. The more complicated way to say it is to say you don't want just the answer to the question, you want to know what does asking that question do? What effects does asking that question produce? What kind of outcomes does that question always point towards? The first thing I do when I'm talking about reading images is I say there's absolutely nothing in an image that can be taken for granted. And if you're going to read it, you have to really go sector by sector. You have to ask the why question about every piece of an image. Why is this particular thing here and not somewhere else? Why do you choose to draw it this way? Did you have to really interrogate images? I mean, that's the basic method I want to bring when I'm using an image. There's nothing in it that's a product of chance. Well, or if there is something in it that's a product of chance, it might be more interesting than the things that are in there deliberately. The first thing they want to do is take careful notes either on paper or mentally about what the thing depicts and how it depicts it. And sometimes just writing it down is a big help. It's a baby, and I find when I'm taking notes that when I write down the image, I often learn a lot about it. So the first thing they want to do is give it a careful formal study of the structure of the thing. What is it depicting and how?