ArcaMax

The penny, which costs more to make than it's worth, will be going away. That's a shocking reversal of government policy. Usually, the government doesn't stop producing anything that's overpriced or just plain worthless.

I'm just about old enough to remember little pieces of candy that sold for a penny at a little wooden-floored store near my house called "Mac's." The man behind the counter was, of course, Mac. If there was a woman behind the counter, it was Mrs. Mac.

I will still bend double to pick up a penny off the sidewalk, even in a snowstorm.

My wife thinks that's funny.

"It's cold as hell out here," she says, running for the door of our house. "What are you doing?"

"Picking up a penny," I tell her. "A hundred of them still make a dollar."

Pennies from heaven. A penny for your thoughts.

Some people think finding a penny is good luck, but some people think it's good luck only if the penny is heads up. If the tail side of the coin is up, it's bad luck.

President Abraham Lincoln's head is on the penny. Lincoln freed the slaves. That's a decision some people still don't support.

But there's not much outrage about the Lincoln head penny being taken off the market.

Remember when they took Aunt Jemima off the bottle of pancake syrup? You could hear the howls of pain from the Gulf of America to Canada, America's 51st state.

Lincoln, though, we flush Lincoln like he was John McCain.

Of course, Abe is still on the fin.

Single. Deuce. Fin. Sawbuck. Double sawbuck. Half-a-yard. Yard.

Those are the slang names I learned for United States paper money. Lincoln is on the $5 bill, or fin.

So, he's probably OK for now, even though there's just the single between him and the street. I'm worried, though. Whatever it costs to make, the $5 bill won't buy much of anything anymore. How long before Lincoln gets "canceled" and we can forget that anyone freed the slaves, which would be a real boon to people who pay minimum wage?

People fought for Aunt Jemima because she was a "great woman erased from history" and because she was a comforting reminder of slavery and segregation's upside, which was hog fat, handkerchief-on-the-head, happy Mammy taking care of her beloved white family and flipping flapjacks. Did she go rioting through the streets when a white cop killed her son? She did not. She didn't sue anybody, either. She cried some, and she had a little talk with Jesus, and then she went out in the kitchen and whomped up another batch of them good ole flapjacks.

Lincoln, on the other hand, went rioting through the whole country, refusing to leave the Confederacy alone, freeing other people's livestock and making Robert E. Lee sad. That Lincoln sounds like an outside agitator to me.

I don't think anybody's gonna miss Lincoln. He never cooked a flapjack in his life.

Slavery is the bone in America's throat, and it won't go down. I don't know that it ever will.

A flapjack, now, that goes down easy, and sweet with syrup.

To find out more about Marc Dion, and read words by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com. Dion's latest book, a collection of his best columns, is called "Mean Old Liberal." It is available in paperback from Amazon.com, and for Nook, Kindle and iBooks.