An email from Marek - Rewriting John Maynard Keynes in 2003

"The power to become habituated to his surroundings is a marked characteristic
of mankind. Very few of us realise with conviction the intensely unusual,
unstable, complicated, unreliable, temporary nature of the economic
organisation by which American Command and Control Narcissistic Elite
Coroporations have lived for the last century.

We assume some of the most peculiar and temporary of our late advantages in
technology as natural, permanent, and to be depended on - and we lay our plans
accordingly, and on this sandy and false foundation we scheme for social
improvement and dress our political platforms, pursue our animosities and
particular ambitions...(Hello to all you guys in Washington D.C.)

The outward aspect of life does not yet teach us to feel or realise in the
least that an age is over. We are busy picking up the threads of our life where
we dropped them, with this difference only, that many of us seem a good deal
poorer than we were before - with our hopes of winning a lottery in the land of
somewhere, someday.

Where we wasted billions before (Yo, Enron boys.), we have now learnt that we
can spend hundreds of billions (on two fronts) and apparently not suffer for it
(Yo Mister President.) We look, therefore, not only to a return to the
comforts of 1980s, but to an immense broadening and intensification of them.
All classes alike thus build their plans, the rich to spend more and save less,
the poor to spend more and work less (rising tide lifs all the boats, Yeah
baby.)

But perhaps it is only in Amerika (Para Espanol press numero dos) that it is
possible to be so unconscious. In the rest of the world the earth heaves and no
one but is aware of the rumblings. There it is not just a matter of
extravagance or 'labour troubles'; but of life and death (Yo, my people in
Somalia), of starvation and existence (Yo, my people in Sudan), and of the
fearful convulsions of a dying civilisation (Farewell to you Arabian Nights of
Kurdistan)

In this winter of 2003 in which I write, we are at the dead season of our
fortunes. The reaction from the exertions, the fears, and the sufferings of the
past years is at its height. Our power of feeling or caring beyond the
immediate questions of our own material well-being is temporarily eclipsed. We
have been moved already beyond endurance, and need rest. Never in the lifetime
of men now living has the universal element in the soul of man burnt so dimly.
For these reasons the true voice of the new generation has not yet spoken"

Thank you for your attention
Marek J
---
The above was appropriated, reconfigured and adapted from John Maynard Keynes's
introduction to "The Economic Consequences of the Peace" in the year of Our Lord, The Decimal System 1919.

P.S. Thanks Tom for posting. I didn't have means during the day.