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April 27, 2005
America Bends Over
Posted by The Happy Tutor
Harmonyat the pump.
Goodbye, Hello
Posted by The Author Function 
Dead? You decide. Maybe a living dead man. A dweller at the margins of life and death, the corpse blogging in a state of exception.
In any case, I am thinking of shutting, or downsizing, WB for awhile and trying something that is more difficult, too difficult for me to have done earlier, without the practice I have had here. To write in propria persona for me is very hard because I know that I am perjured long since. The self who speaks plain prose, the moderate man, the well-educated failure, the Dick Minim in me, is a coward. He is me, but I have no respect for him, and live out his days in sorrow and shame, a sleepwalker among the others. The Happy Tutor, friends, is my alter ego, as the Red Baron was Walter Mitty's. How then can I come forward, using my own name, into the public square, knowing that, as a corporate employee, I am bound by an iron decorum, wealth bondage indeed?
Yet, I have found a way out, subject to whatever reprisal follows my temerity. If you read Horace's Ars Poetica, Swift on Sermons, or Dr. Johnson's Rambler essay in which he introduces the poetaster, Dick Minim, you will find the precedents. Write like a genial person, within the decorum of moderation, and insert into the text dialogue with fictional personages, or accounts of their doings, as if they were newsmakers, or friends met on a stroll through the city. The admixture of fiction explodes the frame, making the genial moderator both Master of Ceremonies and unwitting Dupe of his own creation. (And I deserve it; can't write honestly without every sentence foregrounding the Fool that I have become, through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault.)
So, yes, I was all along a corporate functionary, a charitable cheerleader, a harmless drudge, inoffensive, ineffectual, well-socialized to the world of Wealth Bondage that we call Freedom, lest we be sent to the Freedom Pens to reconsider.
Fewer posts now, with malice of forethought. In the public eye - a thumb therein. First Carnival, then Lent. We are emptying the Public Stew of WB and moving uptown for now to Gifthub, where the moderator, his Stooge-like Bio on full display, will make a Public Fool of himself with the help of his imaginary friends.
All my seedy disenfranchised Dumpster-Dwelling readers are welcome. But help me lay the rhetorical traps - don't spring them please. Wear a coat and tie or nice pressed skirt and blouse (if you are gay, transgendered, or female). Act like everything is normal, by the business definition of normal. Write in your most educated tones. The moderator there is a serious, though, genial man. He will be, no doubt, nonplussed by the rude and the vulgar, for Philanthropy is a high class topic, befitting First Rate Clowns and Courtiers of Good Breeding and Good Taste. (Don't use Call-Girls if can't afford the Tariff.) The moderator is a reputable figure in the world of Ultra High Net Worth Giving. He don't come cheap. And he does not consort with riffraff like you, though he is too polite to say so.
With luck we will inveigle the moderator's real world friends, the thought leaders of Philanthropy, and their clients, and the client's retainers, including their think tank thinkers, onto the Gifthub, to comment or as guests. What had been the WB Killing Floor is now a Drawing Room, though the difference evades me. Same Brothel, new Scene Room.
What is at stake is more than talk. Gifthub is - or could be - the public space in which changemakers meet to form working collaborations in the public interest, be it Carnival or Lent. Bring your checkbook. We are going to make the world a better place. By whose definition of better? Those who bring the money? Or those who beat it out of them? Well, as Dick Minim says, "You catch more flies with honey than with gall." Though as a wit here noted, the most flies are found around a rotted corpse - and I should know.
April 26, 2005
Figure/Ground Reversal
Posted by The Happy Tutor
Would you like an ad with that, Sir?
April 24, 2005
Justice Sunday: Mammon in the Pulpit
Posted by The Happy Tutor
Of the Ten Commandments, two prohibit coveting. One requires caritas, or love of neighbor. False gods are expressly prohibited. In the free market system, by contrast, coveting and various other lusts, is the engine that drives capital formation, GNP, job growth, and stock prices. From the accrued profit comes PR, lobbying, think tank thinkers, and propaganda piped into every possible venue, including places of worship. Thus, Mammon, out on parole, enters the Temple and preaches the Sermon. You might say that mankind tried Christianity and it didn't work. So we are now under the sway of the Devil who uses Christ as his shill. I, for one, refuse to worship the Devil, no matter who is President.
April 23, 2005
Listen to Justice Sunday Simulcast
Posted by Captain Blowtorch in Hot Pursuit
Justice Sunday Simulcast Schedule
Webcast
Via Dish Network
Do not let Seculular Humanists and their activist judges destroy our Country.
Indigo Ocean
Posted by The Happy Tutor
Indigo Ocean returns to blogging. Welcome back.
Brain Dead & Homeless
Posted by The Happy Tutor
Who will keep the homeless alive on what feeding tube, at whose expense? Of course, that gets you into the difference between guilt and innocence. The poor deserve to die in the streets.
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