I call this design the sucker fish emblem. If you look at it in the right way, you can kind of see a face: the cruely barbed hook for an ear; the leaden sinker for an upwardly gazing eye; and a twist in the line framing its slack, wonderingly open mouth. If you don’t see it, then perhaps I have been too subtle.
I make this design available free for any purpose. If you have any questions I am best contacted by e-mail at gan@starling.us.
Simply perform a right-click save-as to copy any single image. Collect as many as you like. The white-filled versions work best over light colored patterns and JPEG backgrounds. The transparent ones are for solid color backgrounds.
Click here to view and obtain a copy of my original master PostScript file. Note that you must rename it after saving to hooklineandsinker.eps by changing the extension from *.txt to *.eps. Only then will it be importable into any decent word-processing program as an EPS object. There is no bitmap preview included as this would make the file difficult to edit.
Users may wish to tweak the EPS code slightly with a simple text editor if they desire. I have embedded comment-instructions into the file which provide guidance.
Know that all of the above GIF’s are daughter images of this same master PostScript file. I generated the first draft using Mayura Draw. Then I modified the EPS code a bit, inserting some resolution enhancements. I also put in some comments on how end-users might take advantage of these. Here, in detail, are the steps I took...
I did so out of patriotism. Know this, In God We Trust is categorically not our national motto. It never has been. That is just an overly pious phrase which started being stamped on coins after the Civil War. So Congress, groping for anything which many in the North and the South might agree upon, trampled all over the Constitution which clearly forbade any such law.
What else can it be except a law respecting the establishment of religion? It clearly dis-includes any non-monotheistic faith. It is absolutly counter to Animism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Hinduism, Paganism, Shinto, Spiritism, Wicca, etc. Then once established, the mint defaced ever more coins in defacto support of the utterly false “Christian Democracy” myth. Last came the one-dollar bill, which was free of it right up until the 1960’s
It’s not even an un-official national motto. Our most historic unofficial national motto is LIBERTY. This has been on every single one of our coins since we became a nation. Our actual official national motto is E Pluribus Unum, which means From Plurality, Union.
Requiring all citizens, whether they be mono-theistic or not, to express trust in a particiular god with every transaction they make is an affront to LIBERTY. Further, it is also a most brazen assault on plurality. What they are wanting to do is redact our history. They are promoting the myth that we were ordained by the Founding Fathers as a Christian Democracy, which is an utter and outright lie.
The Founding Fathers could not agree on the matter of religion. Some of them were not even Christian, or at least not proper Christians:
The Founding Fathers comprised a plurality amongst themselves. And a strongly willed one at that! No, their only true union of spirit was political and economic. Never religious. Not in the least. They could not agree at all on the topic of religion. Between them they could not have even agreed upon a definition for who was and was not Christian.
Jefferson called himself a Christian all the while believing Jesus to be wholly human and not in the least divine. John Adams clearly hated just about everything Catholic. Franklin publicly gave his name to an out-of-wedlock son. And when the troops at Valley Forge were at their lowest emotional ebb, George Washington had read aloud at every campfire encouragement written by none other than that fire-breathing anti-Christian, Thomas Paine, to rally their sagging spirits. You know the speech... It begins: “These are the times to try men’s souls...”
It is surpassingly difficult to assay the religious convictions of many at this late remove. I have searched diligently on the Internet with little result other than to learn in which church yard this or that Founding Father was buried. Still, I did find that among less well remembered signers of the Constitution was Maryland’s Daniel Carroll, brother of John Carroll, the first Roman Catholic bishop in the United States. Richard Bassett of Delaware was devoutly Methodist. Conneticut’s William Samuel Johnson had a strong association with the Anglican Church. David Brearly was a leading member of the Masonic Order in New Jersey.
No record could I find which might hint that the Founding Fathers desired other than a secular focus for the nation they were birthing. Certainly they did not intend a Christian Democracy as fundamentalists wish us to believe. While it is true that Hamilton framed a term vaguely similar for a political party which he later abandoned the idea of forming, he clearly meant it in the quite same vein as Jefferson. Hamilton himself displayed no other religious sentiment until he lay upon his death bed — and then, apparently, only to appease his wife.
No, clearly it is not so. Our fledgling nation was by no means united in faith. Quite the opposite, in fact. Prior even to the Revolution the colonies suffered religious strife. Pennsylvania history records that Benjamin Franklin led the Quaker party in a political attack against the Anglican and Presbyterian parties there over some matter to do with taxation. Further back, the colony of Rhode Island was founded as place of religious freedom for those fleeing persecution by Puritans in Massachusetts. Maryland colony was similarly chartered as a haven for Catholics. Where then can a case be made for religious unity among the American colonies?
All the above are recorded facts. Who can possibly construe that somehow Massachusetts Puritans, Maryland Catholics, Carolinas Baptists, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island Quakers...not to mention the Masons and Deists...could have joined forces toward one harmonious spiritual goal? Before answering, consider that each individual would be seeing his own eternity as weighed in the balance... What chance compromise then?
No way in any of eight separate hells could the Founding Fathers ever have united in mutual faith. Faith entirely divided them. Yet they overcame this division. United by the common enemy of King George and the threat, as Franklin put it, that in failing to hang together all would surely hang separately, they chose to not address the issue. They wisely set the contentious topic well to the side. As Jefferson put it, “The provence of government extends to actions only, and not opinions.”
That is how the Founding Fathers chose to ordain our government: not as a faithless, but rather as a faith-neutral democracy, where each might in liberty exercise the faith of their own choosing...or even not, if they so choose. No officer of the state was given charge to spiritually lead the masses in any one direction or other: neither President, nor Senator, nor Congressman, nor even any local Board of Education.
I had joked around for more than fifteen years that the fish emblem would look more appropriate with a hook, line and sinker in it. But I did not commit myself to greater effort than the occasional hand-written sketch because I had no wish to hurt people’s feelings. Anything more formal and elaborate than a private chuckle between friends would cross the line into public meanness. But it seems to me that monotheists are getting pretty mean themselves nowadays. Emboldened, they are. They even seem to be tipping the scale of public opinion counter to recorded fact in an overt campaign to re-write American history. They have now got their motto — which is not mine on all of the money. And they want it plastered all over the inside of the public schools. Their fish logo has now appeared in a city emblem somewhere down South.
Really, now, that is just plain too much. And I am very sick of it. It is just too damn...er...fishy for public consumption. So this is how I have chosen to oppose the movement, and to aid others who wish to oppose it. The fish-mongers want to change how people look at our common history? Okay...I will do my best to change how their fish emblem commonly shall look to others.
Let anyone who sees the fish think also of a hook, line and sinker, which is exactly what they’ve been hoping everyone might swallow in brokering their two thousand year old fish story. So, please do, spread this around. I only ask that if you make any money on it you must rightly share this with me, however little that it may be. I worked pretty hard on it and deserve a share, or a sample, or something anyway. At minimum, I hope that you have been ammused.
Insincerely,
Gan Uesli Starling
November 2001
Bonus Link #1: Where to purchase a custom made, hardened steel, hand stamp to overstrike the word “God” on U.S. coins with the negating universal circle-and-slash. Find out why such an act is entirely legal under U.S. law.
Bonus Link #2: More facts and links about the Founding Fathers. Major fundamentalist myth debunked for outright lie.