Abe Lincoln and Frank Lloyd Wright

Sometimes, two stamps that are unremarkable by themselves take on new meaning when affixed next to each other. The sum of the unrelated images and themes reveals a story untold by the individual parts.

Such is the case with these two stamps.

The story here is the story of the two Americas.

Could there be any starker contrast in motif than the Lincoln and The Log Cabin image next to that of Wright and the Guggenheim? Is there any building more un-cabinny than the Guggenheim (and vice versa)?

Red and blue America, baby, right here on a scrap of envelope. Country Mouse and City Mouse. Bumpkin and Slicker. No Culture vs. High Culture, Traditional Values vs. Godless Heathens.

You get the idea.

Perhaps there's another story here, though, a story not of division in America, but of a shared struggle. These stamps represent where we've been, and where we're going: From our rough-hewn agrarian past, through the bitterness of a Civil War and the toil of an industrial revolution, and headlong into that curvaceous modernism where form trumps function...

I don't know. Maybe it's just me. Maybe they're just stamps.