The latest selection by President Bush to the Cultural Property Advisory Committee already has some in the archaeological community grumbling as they see Brent Benjamin’s appointment as “bad news”. That is hardly unexpected I suppose, considering that archaeologists have in effect had a lock on at least one of the museum community seats on the committee for some time. Based on Mr. Benjamin’s background, as Director of the Saint Louis Art Museum, it seems likely that he may be more broadly representative of the museum community’s needs and interests than we have seen recently. The mounting friction between museums and archaeology may seem odd, but pressures from the archaeological community against a globalist view of collecting have hurt museums as well as private collectors and made the two groups allies in a cultural property war that has literally been forced upon them. The Ancient Coin Collectors Guild has worked closely with museum administrators and curators in a cooperative effort to preserve collector rights. Mr. Benjamin’s appointment bodes well for a restoration of the balance that law mandates in the CPAC process. We wish him well.

Here in our little backwater community nestled deep in the Ozarks, there are basically two places where one can read the latest local news and views. One is the Ozark County Times, an independently operated weekly and the other is Rural Missouri, a monthly tabloid format publication of the Association of Missouri Electric Cooperatives. I find that reading these two publications is a pleasure, because they are a sort of throwback to Thomas Paine’s Common Sense. This is, after all, Missouri. In the October 2008 edition of the latter, is a guest column by Richard Biever that caught my eye. Mr. Biever is senior editor of The Electric Consumer, the official publication of Indiana’s electric cooperatives. The crux of Mr. Biever’s message is that idealism is a laudable human characteristic and passionate idealists help us focus on the ultimate goal. BUT, forcing idealistic solutions through oppressive and onerous governmental policies is, to Mr. Biever, a worrisome approach. I agree. Biever was responding directly to a young student’s comment that advocated artificially raising fossil fuel prices to force conservation. After pointing out the adverse effects of such a radical approach, Biever tossed out one of those pearls of wisdom that ought to be tatooed on the forearm of every legislator and administrator in Washington:

“Too much passion—without compassion—breeds self-righteous extremists who seek their ends by any means.”

Is that not exactly what collectors of ancient coins face in their defensive struggle against the self-righteous extremists who hold court in the cultural property arena these days? As Mr. Biever points out, idealists are all too often callous to the needs and rights of others. There is nothing partisan about self-righteous idealism, it can wear a coat of many political colors. We have even seen the bastion of democracy, the United States Government, subvert the law of the land in a wave of idealism. No, I’m not talking about excesses perpetrated under the umbrella of the Patriot Act. I’m talking about the supposedly staid and stoic State Department, in a malestrom of self-righteous idealism, trampling all over the legal rights of collectors. Those rights are preserved in the Convention on Cultural Property Implementatin Act, though no casual observer would expect so these days. Left unopposed, the State Department will methodically eliminate, in a wave of self-righteous extremism, the right to import ancient coins from every nation that ever produced them.

There is only one course available to those who respect and honor the 600-year-old tradition of private collecting—we must vigorously oppose the self-righteous extremists who challenge us, just as the energy industry opposes those of a similar mind set. To do that, click on this link http://accg.us and become a member of the most active advocacy group for ancient coin collectors in the world. Even if you don’t collect ancient coins, the principle here alone warrants your support.

Anyone who pays the slightest attention to Washington doings can hardly avoid being struck by the operatic nature of governance. It may be humorous or tragic, by turns, but it can also be mysterious. How do rather consequential things happen? Better yet, who makes them happen? These are ageless questions that have inspired countless authors and playwrights—not to mention political analysts and lobbyists. The Ancient Coin Collecting community is no stranger to the sometimes bizarre world of Washington politics, where the largest cast and most Machiavellian plots are routinely encountered at the U.S. State Department.

It may strike some as humorous that an innocuous group like coin collectors can find themselves pitted against the Hydra of bureaucracy—an event of almost mythical character and proportions. But, not to be outdone by the Greeks, the DOS Hydra is also invisible! Rarely do the State Department and the Defense Department share techniques, but the cloaking of bureaucrats in Foggy Bottom bears all of the characteristics of invisible paint camouflage—making their actions unobservable to the radar of the public and the press. This invisible shield has been recognized for at least a decade, though getting a clear picture is obviously a challenge. The late Steven Vincent, in Art and Auction (March, 2002) labeled Maria Kouroupas, at the State Department’s Cultural Heritage Center as a “Stealth Fighter” who is “Washington’s smart weapon in its shadowy war on collecting antiquities.”

The cloaking of DOS bureaucrats has become readily apparent through (the lack of) documents released in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the numismatic community. In 2007, the State Department negotiated an agreement with the government of Cyprus to restrict the importation of ancient Cypriot coins into the United States. Though a landmark decision, in the sense that no previous Memorandum of Agreement (including an earlier one with Cyprus) had ever included a restriction on coins, this decision was apparently made in a vacuum. The State Department has repeatedly searched its records and claims that it can find no communication on the subject of coins between its two key players, Maria Kouroupas and Nicholas Burns, or between either of them and the Cypriot government. Further, no communication between either of them and a host of other specified individuals and agencies can be found. Indeed, it seems that the interaction between DOS and the government of Cyprus, lauded publicly by the Cypriot Ambassador to the U.S., is invisible.

The coin issue was hardly obscure to Kouroupas and Burns. The collector opposition to this MOU was so intense that it reportedly caused a breakdown of the fax processing equipment within the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs where Kouroupas is assigned. A few email exchanges involving archaeologist Andrew Cohen, an assistant to Kouroupas, verify the involvement of ECA in the decision to add coins to the list of restricted item. Apparently there was not enough of the invisible paint to cloak Cohen entirely. It seems a bit ironic that the U.S. Senate is presently holding a special investigation into the issue of secrecy among groups like the Cultural Property Advisory Committee. It seems ironic as well that the Republican candidate for president made a specific issue of bureaucratic transparency during his nomination acceptance speech. Elected officials in Washington are quick to support transparency as a necessary element of Democracy. However, the much touted Freedom of Information Act must be a coffee-room joke at the U.S. State Department where ECA audaciously touts the act in its briefings to visiting journalists from other nations and then ignores FOIA requests with impunity.

There is more than a phantom in the opera at DOS, the opera is itself a phantom.