Yet money can save lives, raise peoples' lives from misery, yet only if motivated by kindness, the biggest self-interest of all. Doing a fine job of delivery there! What little there is, compared to the bail-out of the super-rich, or the CEO bonuses waved in our faces like red rags!
  Second is the relative invisibility of the longsuffering underclass, who don't make headlines unless they flip out and do something media-worthy, or some tragedy rips off the cellophane covering the uncomfortable truth, as did Katrina.
  It's difficult to overestimate the importance of Katrina on the world psyche, it was the clearest picture ever of the dark underbelly of the 'american dream', and the cruel injustice of the system that touted itself as so exceptional with that myth. Stripped of said myth, it was revealed as no more than the old I've got mine, so fuck off, devil take the hindmost we've seen down through the ages in almost all cultures in recorded history. The whole game would be over but for the glamour element. Yet we are all so damn prone to its magnetism, conditioned as we are, it's near-sexual in its strength, impossible to ignore. What is it we really need, after the basics are met, does it have to be this way?
  Like those of the fall of the Twin Towers, the images of Katrina will continue to reverberate for many years, doing their subconscious work of helping people evolve to aspiring to something new and better to ascribe value to, than the tired, crumbling old gods.
  While money always had huge power since its invention, the poor had so little of it as to be irrelevant. Methinks the present widespread fetishisation of money springs from the industrial revolution, and the breaking up of centralised monarchies. All of a sudden money flowed outside the centennially, centrally proscribed channels in a more democratic and meritocratic way than before.
  If you invented something, anything, that could be mass-produced, and patented, then you became a kind of royalty in your access to all the toys and trappings (excellent word!), but without the boring protocols and public accountability that stultify the lives of the real royals. They don't call them 'royalties' for nothing...
  How was it possible to make serious money if you were poor before the industrial revolution?
  What ladders permitted one social ascent, other than artisanry, the military or the clergy? Art worked for a tiny amount of people, certainly more exception than rule though.
 If someone invented a better wagon axle any time between 5000BC and around 1750 AD, would his idea have catapulted him to the life of a pasha, like the invention of the bic lighter, or tupperware?
  So the nouveau-riche stepped up to their place in the sun, and soon there were so many of them, and economies grew, more children grew to maturity, the phenomenon of the middle class emerged, with the 'service industry' growing proportionally. Education became more widespread, increasing possibilities for 'class migration' and here we are, in a world where if you asked the average 10-year-old in England if he'd rather grow up to have the life of Richard Branson or that of Prince Charles, it would be 99-1 for the Virgin CEO, who doesn't have to show up at one yawn-inducing, constipated, stodgily symbolic ritual after another, to keep his perks. Bin there, done that, out the other side!
  Money as passe-partout, the greasy pole available to anyone with enough wits and willpower to climb to the top of the social pile, get the RESPECT that previously was accorded only to those blessed with noble birth!
  Inherited, dynastical money creates another form of aristocracy, another story...
  So this idiot fantasy cloud we see surrounding money had its roots in, is a vestige of the awe at the freedom it brought for Joe Sixpence to leapfrog the rules that had kept his caste 'in place' for centuries, barring exceptional luck, beauty or talent.
  The mavericks, the whizz kids... they were the bad boys, sexy, vital John Galts bringing civilisation to the miserable, mobility, electricity, street lights, hospitals SCIENCE!!!
  Money as revolutionary tool...  
  This perception about whom we now call 'yuppies'is changing to one we proles used to have about the monarchy, one part woo-woo, the other that they are a scurrilous bunch of rascals that need taking down off their arrogant pedestals (that we built).  
  I remember LIFE magazine covers from the 50's with pix of balding, plump cigar-in-hand tycoons (like typhoons, awesome forces of nature) with names like Lucius Vanderbilt IV, and by then the tide was turning, they weren't really sexy anymore, unless the spell was working, Kool-Aide-drunk, in which case you had  evil old toads like Kissinger talking about how power was the greatest aphrodisiac ever...
  That power was money, hanging with the 'big boys', the allure of magical class-smashing transformation, without the rules normal rubes had to live by, the mojo that made even the encrusted old-paradigm powerbrokers bend their knees.
  We still haven't invented any symbol as powerful as money has been, to upend established hierarchies. (Perhaps information is taking its place, and we're at the stage of nibbling on it in blogs like this one to see if it's fake or real, as of old with gold). Will the internet be more than the sum of its parts, a force and vehicle for ideas that can upend status quo's in an as-yet novel way?
  Money's the most fungible 'thing' we've invented, as symbol it has come to have more valence than the old ideas of conscience, morality or virtue we used for centuries to 'rise above the beasts', or even the hard commodities it was printed to stand for.
  It has become a virtue in and of and for itself, the medium has become the message.
  That is becoming more obviously unsustainable, as we crave more than life built on simple expediency, and the mythic(al?) power of money will be replaced by something else, homo oeconomicus in its purer forms (sophisticated Ponzi scheme/casino 'financial service providers') is on its way to extinction. I affirm that, lol!
  What that something else is, will be up to us to create, or is it emerging from the cracks while we bend our minds to it?
  Money will always be around, but maybe its power to corrupt will lessen, as more people change their values towards a more human way of life, or philosophy, if you prefer.
  For that to happen, it will take a hell of a lot of demystification, which is what's a-starting, the falling of the tallest virtual tower man ever created.
  Proving that trust is what people need, (as we finally get to understand, writ large, what happens when it's overextended then abused), and when we can't trust leaders not to abet stealing from us while they sleep, then maybe we need to start trusting in each other more...
  In somma, there is as yet no 'one idea' that has come close to substituting the sticky practicality of the idea of money, and we have yet fully to come to terms with the dangers of fetishising it, and the poor have no place at the table, they are ignored, no levers of power for them, discouraged as they are to vote. Maybe Obama can change that, but how, if, as Frank points out here, he continues to ignore it, unlike Edwards, who emphasised it clearly, and was outvoted for his pains? Denial still outweighing reality...
  Excuse the length, brevity took a hike.'Come back!'
  It's snowing outside here, good blogging weather, thanks for listening...