MPC Scrip

Lyrics

[Intro]
The victor's dollar is a powerful thing.
Too powerful.
It leaks through fences, floods the market, buys the black.
So you make a new dollar. A private dollar.
A promise with a secret expiration date.

[Verse 1]
September fifteenth, nineteen forty-six.
In the ruins of Austria, Germany, Japan.
Treasury issues Series Four-Sixty-One.
Not green, but bright. Colorful.
With Liberty's face looking sideways.
This is money for the Post Exchange.
Money for the soldier, inside the wire.
A paper wall to keep the real faith out.

[Chorus]
They called it funny money. Play money.
Good for a haircut and a pack of American cigarettes.
But every note you held was a ghost in waiting.
Worth everything at sundown,
worth nothing come the dawn.
Military Payment Certificates.
Money on a timer, set by a man you'll never see.

[Verse 2]
You get your pay in this scrip.
You fold it in your wallet.
You buy your girl a silk scarf at the Base Commissary.
It feels real enough in your hand.
But you can't send it home.
You can't use it in town.
It's a language only spoken on the island of the uniform.
A shared delusion, by design.

[Chorus]
They called it funny money. Play money.
Good for a haircut and a pack of American cigarettes.
But every note you held was a ghost in waiting.
Worth everything at sundown,
worth nothing come the dawn.
Military Payment Certificates.
Money on a timer, set by a man you'll never see.

[Bridge]
Vietnam. March fourteenth, nineteen sixty-eight.
Midnight.
They call it Operation Hustle.
The word comes down the line: turn it in.
Series Six-Four-One is dead paper now.
In the humid dark, you stand in line at the finance shack.
Anxious hands swapping old colors for new.
Hoping you didn't keep a stash under your bunk.
Hoping the locals you paid for laundry don't find you tomorrow.

[Outro]
And then, January twenty-seventh, seventy-three.
The Paris Peace Accords are signed.
The last series is withdrawn.
The experiment ends.
Twenty-seven years of temporary faith.
It was just a tool to manage an empire.
A lesson, printed on cheap paper:
all money is a promise.
And any promise can be broken by the state.