A short history of what man covets most - STUFF

Other humans had the idea of printing tokens for all the stuff in the world. No matter how quickly stuff grew, the ability of the high-speed presses was guaranteed to match that stuff, even if it got up to light speed.

Those cultists believed that the paper tokens exerted an unexplained force upon stuff. By controlling the movement of the tokens, they reasoned that stuff might be controlled through a process of mutual attraction. In a self-congratulatory gesture, the cultists gave themselves a name - economists - which used to be a pretty big word in those days.

The economists were off to a flying start, but some silly humans forgot to be paranoid about stuff and started grabbing tokens instead. They locked the tokens away in boxes for a rainy day, which meant that the printers had to issue much more, to account for all of the stuff in the world.

For reasons lost in the mists of time, those boxes were called banks, which was silly because they were actually boxes.

Even at this stage of the story, you can see that it's all going to end in tears, because many of the humans were beginning to lose their sanity.

Frankenstein's economists

One day, without any thought for the curse of mutual attraction, the boxes of tokens were opened. In hindsight, some humans thought that those boxes should have been destroyed, but having been opened, the boxes yielded up their terrible secret.

It turned out that the total quantity of paper tokens exceeded all of the stuff in the world by a very large margin.

Then the forces of mutual attraction seemed to reach out across the globe with a giant sucking sound, in search of stuff to satisfy the tokens. Rock 'n roll superstars threw their bodies across great piles of loot in a suicidal attempt to shield the world from the deadly rays.

They needn't have bothered, because the force of mutual attraction had never existed - ever. It was all in the minds of the "Tokenistas" whose faith in the power of money had granted them trillions of free lunches, along with the unfettered and unearned ownership of the planet.

If the ordinary stuff-loving masses ever got wind of the heist, there would have been hell to pay. In order to redress the balance between tokens and stuff, the world's premiere champagne stuff-multipliers had to be applied - no less than the abundant sweet oils of Iraq and Iran.

Only those oils were capable of accelerating the quantity of all the stuff in the world, until it equalled the amount of tokens. To get that premium stuff with the greatest possible haste, the Tokenistas needed a scurvy crew with the cunning of Sir Francis Drake and the propaganda of Joseph Goebbels.

History records that the humans who stepped up to the plate in that dire hour of need, were known as the Cheney Energy Taskforce. History fails to record however, that they were all disabled.