The following text may have been generated by Optical Character Recognition, with varying degrees of accuracy. Reader beware!

8 - Orono Weekly Times Wednesday, March 31, 2010 Basic Black by Arthur Black Money can't buy you love I have the feeling that in a balanced life one should die penniless. The trick is in dismantling. -- Art Garfunkel Ah, yes: money. Tricky commodity, that. Money -more specifically the pursuit of it -- has besmirched and bedevilled humankind since...forever, really. Since the first Cro Magnon con artist turned to his cavemate and grunted the equivalent of "Sweet loincloth. I'll give you thirty clamshells for it." Cash, bread, scratch, loot, dough, long green, filthy lucre. Money has assumed many names and many forms over the eons -- from cowrie shells in China to whale teeth in Fiji. The ancient Aztecs used chocolate (cacao seeds) as currency. Other cultures have favoured everything from ivory to livestock, arrowheads to spices, tobacco to wampum. It was always all about money, as, alas, it still so often is. The writer James Baldwin, who spent a lot of years without much of it, concluded that money was exactly like sex. "You thought of nothing else if you didn't have it," wrote Baldwin, "and thought of other things if you did." A newspaper reporter once asked famous holdup artist Willie Sutton why he robbed so many banks. Sutton regarded the reporter as if he was perhaps a little slow and replied gently, "Because that's where the money is." Well, duh. Money. It shapes our lives; some would say it warps them. Unless we refuse to play, like Karl Rabeder did. Herr Rabeder, an Austrian aged 47, used to swim in the deep end of the money pool. He lived in a villa in the Alps and vacationed in a 19th-century farmhouse in Provence, all thanks to a thriving international furniture business that left him with a fortune of $5-million in the bank. And then one day he decided he would give it all away. Sold the villa, the chateau and the business, set up charities in Central and South America, and endowed them with his fortune -- every cent. "Money is counterproductive," he told a reporter for The Daily Telegraph. "It prevents happiness to come." Rabeder says he plans to retreat to a small wooden shack in the mountains. His friends and family think he's nuts -- they told him so. He's not listening to them. "I was just listening," he says, "to the voice of my heart and soul." Good luck to Mister Rabeder -- but I bet if James Baldwin was still around he'd be rolling his eyes. It's easy to be philosophical about money when you have a garage full of it; less so when you're a bit short. Money is like any highly addictive drug: the less you have in your system, the more you crave it. And yet, what are we talking about? Not ivory, not gold or silver -- not even loincloths. We're talking about wrinkly bits of paper festooned with numbers and symbols in coloured ink. A hundred-dollar bill buys a hundred dollars worth of goods and/or services only because you and I and the bank manager believe it can. Paper money is an act of faith. Ask any German who lived through the 1930's when it took a wheelbarrow full of deutschmarks to buy a loaf of bread. Ask anybody in Zimbabwe where, last time I looked, the hyperinflation rate was running at 89.1 sextillion percent. And no, I did not make that up. Ask Dominik Podolsky what paper money is good for. Mister Podolsky, a snowboarder from Munich, was recently stranded overnight on a mountainside in subzero temperatures. He kept warm by crinkling up all the paper money he had in his pockets and using it to start a fire. Reminds me of the story of the London gent in one of the stalls in a public lavatory who realizes -- too late -- that his stall sports only an empty cardboard roll where the toilet paper should be. Fortunately, he hears someone enter the stall next to his. "I say, old chap," he calls out, "I seem to have run out of toilet paper. Would you be kind enough to pass some under the partition?" "Sorry, mate," says the voice next door. "Doesn't seem to be any in here either." "Oh," says the gent. "Then by any chance would you have two fives for a ten?"