Bartoli had opened the clandestine session with Nelson Mandela’s words:
“There can be no keener revelation of a
society’s soul than the way in which it treats its children.”
Three weeks had passed since his unusual family re-union. Three weeks of extraordinary political backroom maneuvering among a cluster of statesmen as remarkably small as its constituency large. It had begun with Bartoli’s trip to Prague for another meeting with the Russian governor to introduce the digital homesteading and global marketplace concept. Miraculously, the benefits of the manufacturing opportunity of the mountains of digital equipment necessary, a broader demand for micromanufacturing from millions of new, smaller merchants and access to the largest imaginable market for a surplus of information workers had resonated enough to sew the seeds of the exceptional gathering. Armed with this development, Bartoli had ventured to Casablanca to meet with North Africa’s governor who could not ignore that staying away from the marketplace would make opaque to him much of the world’s emergent information and economy.
2080
Although giving up the benefits of the closed
80