David Byers Brown

Herodotus’s sense of the present moment expands further as he comes across a ragged figure living in a barrel in downtown Frikes.

Diogenes looks up from his task of defacing coins and speaks:

"Debt and money are poetry

The no shit fact of global finance is the insides of your PC

The trauma blood and piss of your human tragedy takes place in toy town

The truth is a set of mysterious simple pictures you move between

The world of objects is a yard sale of disposable set-dressings on its way to the dump

Statistics are internet gangsters trying to steal bits of your identity

A private jet and a bus pass are identical"

Herodotus objects that the sufferings of the Achaeans at the hands of northern barbarians and the furies of international finance are very real, but William Blake who has come to make an engraving of Diogenes, interrupts:

"Reality is not cows or guns, bars of gold nor wheat.

Reality is what gives them an importance and place.

The material is temporary clothing for language and symbols.

The free thinkers of Perfidious Albion run an enormous export surplus with the rest of the world. We manufacture values and descriptions using the raw materials of commodities, ideas and other tradable or flowing objects.

The use of any object or practice has its whole value in our consideration.

A block is a unit that cannot feasibly be unpicked, or re-forms despite best efforts to do so.

Significant qualities are symbols, and symbols are major blocks.

Any product is made of qualities.

We live in a dynamic tensile structure poised between symbols.

The ability to create new tensile links within the common structure is uniquely ours. Countries that may temporarily appear more successful or stable are actually just consumers of the values we devise and our formulations.

No other educational system or culture is able to compete and must use our products. No league table or economic assessment has yet been able to grasp this."

Socrates joins the group.

Socrates fears that the initial public offering of Facebook will inject more mercantile disturbance into his symposiums. He grumbles: “Business is a yard sale to raise money for soup kitchens. Only the our media can interpret the politics of business and finance to appear intelligent. Their conceptual Global Economy is an eat-all-you like restaurant of opportunities for the entrepreneurs of poverty. The hedge fund Hercules hallucinates arbitrage, resurrecting djinns at the airport and great engines somewhere driven by foreign worms. Investors long for new Spartan military slave economies that will exponentially increase the number of containers they ship out every year. By keeping the layout neat, the Toy Town civil service constrains the passions of arrogant national minds like Gilgamesh and enslaving estate managers like Circe. Meanwhile, gobbling the scarce energy of burning hydrocarbons, the hopefully vampiric sole trader scowers the internet for a box of native earth to rent before sunrise. On the other hand, our business is a glass bead game. Our Empire plundered the world to pay for a National Health Service and unemployment benefits- who’d want to build the Pyramids rather than look at them as tourists?"