My Beautiful Laundrette With ATM

I was musing about disparate items: brainwashing, money, and money laundering, just plain laundering, mind, cognition, and whether I should let my laundry do my shirts.
I remembered a short story I once wrote: the Palestinians were obviously not going anywhere here on Earth, so they were offered land on Mars (snicker! snicker!) during the early process of the Terraforming of Mars, and they took it.

Well, you know how this goes. Everybody's happy. The Earth, sort of a 1984 update to incorporate a Bush-like ruling Party which has no ideology, being constitutionally incapable of anything but seat-of-my-pants philosophy and get-rich-quick schemes, is happy. The Palestinians are happy, although they have a difficult existence, but no worse than before.

Well, something valuable is discovered on Mars. Kick the Palestinians off their land. And so it goes. Nihil novi sub sole. So in the long future, there comes into being the figure of the Wandering Palestinian. This may be difficult to believe, but this actually started me thinking about the resemblance of Thought to Money.

Money is sort of a universal solvent, a source of endless liquidity into which any asset may be transformed. So is thought. Everything may be dissolved and transformed. Look how the figure of the Wandering Jew was transformed into the Wandering Palestinian. Nothing to it. I did not think of it. It was there. I was sitting there, pen in hand, and thoughts like diaspora, exodus, from pillar to post, and there it was: the Wandering Palestinian, displaced from Earth, driven from Mars, doomed to wander like a comet, in and out of the immediate neighborhood of the solar system, dodging space junk in the DeKuiper Belt, asking "Baksheesh?" with sunken eyes, and in answer to which we laugh  "Mafeesh!" and call out the dogs.

Now, just as money may be laundered, so may our thoughts. Or, so may our vision of the world be run through the laundry and rendered pink when we wash it with the bloody red pants we threw in. Belief = Liquidity !
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