An embellished non-sequitur look at the Archetypes that be The Cheet and Monica

Originally written as an analysis piece of wallet contents of Jonathan Chee and Monica Gon, and the manifestations they give of the personality and nature of their respective owners.

An embellished non-sequitur look at the Archetypes that be The Cheet and Monica

Now with more spin than Karl Rove!

*Note: Cheet = Jonathan

The American wallet. The source of rash consumerism. A hodgepodge of dead livestock or dead genetically-mutated plants (take your pick). The container of vital information, like licenses, receipts, and mommy’s work phone number. And always, always left in your other pants. This is the American wallet. Some may say that the wallet holds our identity, and given that we often cram in school IDs, driver’s licenses, and other identification, it is on a literal sense. But apart from that, we can interpret subtler forms of identity, the minute clues which the owner hermself may not even realize, and delve deeper into that person’s identity, ultimately divulging the true essence that they are.

Through careful analysis of the wallets, much can be discovered about their respective owners, Jonathan The Cheet and Monica Gon. At the surface, both their wallets and the persons themselves could not be further apart from each other. The Cheet’s wallet, a plain, dark brown, old-fashioned, and most importantly conservative wallet exemplifies his inner-Republican. The wallet is made out of either leather, showing his typical right-wing disdain for nature and animals, or a cheap pleather, which would show his support of outsourcing American economy overseas (where over 98% of pleather products are manufactured), an ideal of the pro-business Republican party. In contrast, Monica’s wallet, was made of a synthetic material (most probably nylon), voicing her opposition to the slaughtering of animals for the purposes of creating wallets, a common view shared among many environmentalist Democrats. Additionally, the design of Monica’s wallet, with all sorts of zippers and velcro fasteners, is a sign of the times, showing modern change (a liberal trait) over the simple and conservative open-up wallet of The Cheet.

As we delve into the contents of their wallets, we find more clues to their entrenched party affiliations, a sign of a deeply polarized nation. In The Cheet’s wallet, we find extremely old and outdated items and also pure junk, such as star burst wrappers (not even neat and flat, but crumpled and folded into a random shape), outdated ID cards, expired memberships, and very old movie tickets—representing the packrat-ness which afflicts many Republicans, who conservatively want to hoard stuff and “keep things the way they are.” In The Cheet’s wallet we also find several fitness card clubs, exposing his desire to be buff like his Republican idol, Arnold Schwarzenegger (as further evidence to this, we note that there are no steroid-enhanced bodybuilding Democrats in political office.) The Cheet’s Peninsula library card is also heavily defaced and scratched, showing his and every Republican’s hate for the federally-controlled library system. In The Cheet’s wallet, we also find 21 dollars, no doubt from a Bush tax cut. In Monica’s wallet, we find many signs of her Democratic tendencies. Her wallet possesses a seafood advisory guide to help save the oceans, which along with her non-animal hide wallet show her sympathy for animals and wildlife, something a Republican would never support. She also contains a multitude of discount cards for a variety of stores and shops, to make up for the lack of Bush tax cuts that the wealthy Republicans enjoy. Perhaps most telling of all, the order in which she arranged her photographs and movie tickets (or at least the order in which we copied them down on our paper) kept alternating between male-female pictures, and violent/bloody and sappy/funny movies, flip-flopping like only true Democrats can.

However, despite this apparent contrast between a hardcore, cow-murdering Republican that is The Cheet, and the flip-floppish, tree-hugging Democrat that is Monica, when we look deeper into the clues that their wallets present, we see an eerily shocking contrast between who they appear to be, and who they really are, so deep and profound a deeper-self that neither The Cheet nor Monica themselves may realize. At their core, the contrast between The Cheet and Monica represents a struggle between the non-conformists and the conformists, and in bizarro world, each one is trying to be the other person.

So yes, in case you were wondering, the essay preceding this was largely irrelevant to our real point.

Though he claims to be a Nazi-Republican morlock, and does indeed incorporate many of the stereotypical traits of one, The Cheet is really a non-conformist. Unlike his male brethren, and despite his male-like stubby fingers, The Cheet managed to fold his paper neatly into a ninja star, instead of conforming and just crumpling the thing up. Additionally, all of The Cheet’s movie stubs are for very sensitive and girly movies, like Terminal, and Notebook, very un-macho and showing that he is unwillingly to submit and sell out to shallow, but heavily advertised and hyped movies with lots of gratuitous explosions and rampant sex. Also, The Cheet, with his tickets to the Asian Art Museum, and the 55^th Anniversary of the Founding of the People’s Republic of China, does not conform to the unbridled allegiance to American culture like a good Republican, stubbornly clinging to his NON-AMERICAN heritage. The heavily defaced library card, though a sign of his staunch Republicanism, also symbolize the fight against government-run education, including libraries, symbolic against the eternal struggle of the non-conformists against “The Man.” Additionally, the macabre poem which was found the next day in a secret pocket of his wallet explicitly exemplified his non-conformity. In each line, the poem states a contrast between opposite elements, “in darkness, light / in silence, words / in death there is life.” The Cheet sees himself as the contrasting figure in the poem, the light which refuses to conform to the darkness around him, words which refuse to conform to silence, and life which refuses to conform to death, though it could also mean that he wants to be a zombie.

Monica, on the other hand, though appearing to be a radical Democrat, is a conformist at heart. This is first apparent upon closer inspection of her wallet, which contains a military-like camouflage pattern, a subconscious indication of her desire to “blend in.” The multitude of discount and business cards in her wallet, most of them for extremely commercial and branded companies and organizations, shows her willingness to conform to the branded nature of teenage consumerism. She has also watched almost every major production movie that has been released this summer, owns one of those spiffy Initial D cards that almost every ultra-hip teen has, and keeps lots of pictures in her wallet, which bear a striking resemblance and no doubt are trapped souls of fallen duelists like in the hit show Yugi-Oh!

The Cheet and Monica are two wholly different people, but there is a single common trait which binds them together: a deep desire to be the other person, in a gender-specific stereotypically psychological manner. The Cheet exhibits many feminine tendencies, namely in his array of chick-flick movie tickets, his ninja-star shaped starburst wrapper, folded neatly like only a girl can do, his receipt for a Caramel Frappuccino Tall (because real men drink Venti), and the presence of some sort of poem which is way beyond the normal depth of male pontification. Monica, on the other hand, exhibits masculine tendencies—her frequent trips to see violent, gory movies, and the military-style wallet which symbolizes her belief in war and violence to solve the world’s problems, all extremely macho and masculine traits.

Through the contents of their wallets, we have gleamed perhaps a fleeting look into the mangled closets that be The Cheet’s and Monica’s personalities. Like people, wallets on the surface may represent one archetype, but as we take a closer and more intimate look into them, like we develop closer and more intimate relationships with them in person, they “open up” and manifest somewhat the person that they believe they are. It is only, however, in the hidden pockets do we finally catch a falling glance at the core essence of the being, such as Jonathan’s poem, tucked neatly away in the darkest, most obscure recesses of the soul (taking Ms. Grandfield an entire day to find), where it is hidden to everyone, and perhaps, even, themselves.