Ira in an expansive mode. ” Is the duodecimal system due for failure”??

Dear reader, we continue with this scintillating extract, (‘My problem with Donald and how i grew to love him”) by Ira Maine Esq, in which he shines further light upon an eternal problem, Debt, crisis, and the planned dismemberment of the national broadcaster. We concluded yesterdays episode with this piece;

This was at once a paradox and only  capable of true resolution  by very intelligent people, by Jesuits, the Church’s  intellectual body.  And what did they decide? Well, the matter is still under serious consideration but, in the interim and allowing for the benefit of the doubt…

Of course it wasn’t!

Wealthy banker absorbed by quotations from the’ Book of Donald’.

Was not the poor God-fearing Christian already being exploited horribly by these grasping moneylenders, driven to penury through insufferable interest rates, reduced to pitiable indigence by a system wholly lacking in honour or decency or compassion?  It was  no wonder then when Kings, with their backs to the financial wall,  with wars to pay for and the terrifying responsibility for an entire kingdom in their hands, found themselves at war,  not with armies but with money. In these new and royally straitened times, money, the filthy lucre of commerce began to display itself in its true and rapacious colours. It was seen to be finally, what had long been suspected;  the Devil’s instrument, the true Antichrist, the root of all evil.  This was especially so for people who were up to their armpits in debt. And, God help us all,  the moneylenders were out there even now, the pitiless instrument of the Devil, preying on an unsuspecting faithful!

“In the name of God,’ bawled the biggest borrowers, ‘before the Hand of the Lord cleave through the clouds and smite us for our tardiness, something must be done!’

The lower orders twitched nervously and looked a bit nonplussed. Inevitably, they thought, whenever the big borrowers spoke like this, somebody always got killed…

‘What? Do what?’ they asked, abjectly shuffling their feet and looking awkward. Then one of the big borrowers had a bright idea.

‘Hold up your IOU’s!’ he bawled.

The mystified mob obediently held up their bits of paper.

‘In hoc signe vincere!’ bawled the blasphemous borrower.

(Trans: In this sign will you conquer)

Monk in the process of nailing an IOU to the door of the Wittenberg Cathedral.

‘In hoc signe vincere!’  the Christians bawled back .(most of them were bald at the back)

(Latin scholars at the Bank of England would later adopt a slightly altered version of this exhortation as their banking raison d’être. It would now read ‘In Hock Signe Vincere’)

The armies of the Lord (IOU Division) were thus assembled and set about their cleansing task.

Competing Banking Systems. Constantinople 1453.

In the end, when kings couldn’t pay their debts, they simply solved the problem by murdering their moneylenders.Thus, whilst doing God’s work of ridding the land of unbelievers and heretics, the practice also conveniently cleared their debts without a single Christian soul being harmed, a caringly Christian and  wholly acceptable conclusion to the whole affair.

Now here, dear reader, I will take my temporary leave of you, and leave you to ponder on what might, alas, have been. I shall conclude this divertissement, presently.

Ira Maine Esq.