Wealth Bondage

The World Who Wants? Or, Thinking Outside Wealth Bondage?

Posted by The Happy Tutor

Video by et. alia gets to the core of it, for those of us who are Dungeon Masters to the world's wealthiest families.

Bob's Site Infilatrated?

Smoky Joe, JD, in Defense of Freedom

Are Bob's friends in wealth bondage, without knowing it? Obviously so since Wealth Bondage is nothing more than the Free Market as we know it. How did we know Bob's friends were reading WB? Easy. In the free market every move you make is surveilled for your own protection. Bob and friends total confusion is indicative of just how pervasive Wealth Bondage really is. They are in it and don't know it and as such they can neither conceptualize nor escape it. Everything is working in accordance with The Master Plan.

Vitia at West Point

Posted by The Happy Tutor

Mike Edwards teaching rhetoric at West Point and blogging it too. Congrats, Mike!

Dumpster Divers Foiled

Smoky Joe, JD, in Defense of Freedom

After the Wealth Bondage Charity Ball we toss out a few tons of shrimp, pate, pheasant, trout, steak, roast beef, cake, pies, nuts, cheese, beer, wine, champaigne, and other items. Recently we have been plaqued by Dumpster Divers who steal this property. Fortunately we have now purchased a trash compactor rendering theft of garbage impossible. Get your own garbage! Or, you will be crushed.

Of course if you are laid off from Wealth Bondage you might want to hunt around in some other company's trash rather than expecting a severance package from us.

Welcome Bob and Friends To Wealth Bondage

Posted by Candidia Cruikshanks, CEO of Wealth Bondage

From a comment about Wealth Bondage at Bob is the Oil Guy: "I'll assume that we're viewing the followers of an elite philosophy.  One that is prefiltered for alleged elite status." That is correct. I have Mr. Scruggs screen readers by asking them to count their own fingers. Ten plus or minus 2 are in, not counting the thumb they have up their sweet little behinds. Come in little boy, Momma wants to show you her milking machine. We are going to clone you idiots to make a race of slaves for us with elite status. Here, Sweetie, let Momma show you. No, Sweetie, hold it for me until I get the pump connected. Next!

Wealth Bondage Is Always Already Over

Posted by Dr. Amrit Chadwallah  in Charge of Hidden Meaning

Well then! From the Epilogue I can only assume that Wealth Bondage is officially 'over' and that we as consumers are now free to leave and return to the real world outside the spell Wealth Bondage has cast over our eyes and over our very lives. Of course Wealth Bondage remains an immortal work of art. Having touched us deeply it lives on in us, as great art always does, determining our perception of reality. Art, as Oscar Wilde noted, does not imitate life, but the other way around. In the case before us, Wealth Bondage does not imitate life, but life imitates Wealth Bondage; so even outside Wealth Bondage we remain in Wealth Bondage, if you see what I mean. 

Looking upon Wealth Bondage as a freshly concluded work of art, its contours now finished, its perfect symetry realized, I feel like a primitive hunter who has with a single throw of his spear brought down a massive Mastodon. Now it is up to me to carve up this immense, and now rotting carcass, to lay bare its bones, trace its entrails and isolate the hidden meanings that now like maggots as thick 'round as your middle finger writhe and copulate in the rotting flesh.

What then did Wealth Bondage mean to its contemporaries, the Dumpster Dwellers, who like a band of nomads camped here for five or six years, 2000-2006, years fraught with history? We can only speculate since these men and women who proudly called themselves Losers are now lost to the dark mists of time. What we can say with some confidence based on the extant record of over comments, not including the thousands that were lost over the years, is that an immortal work of genius like Wealth Bondage is not limited to whatever meaning it may have had to a Scruggs, et. alia, Gerry, Debbie, J.J., Philanthropoid, Rollo, Ahfuckit, Klaus, TV, No Blood for Hubris, or Flipper. Mere human readers come and go. The limits of their necessarily finite understandings can not and must not limit the infinite abundance of meanings overt and covert now festering and breeding in this enormous carcass. The meaning of Wealth Bondage belongs to all humankind and will be revealed only in the fullness of time, I reckon, if time permits. Meanwhile, I do find the Staff symbolism connecting Prospero with The Happy Tutor quite intriguing. The Tutor beats his students, particularly the rich and spoiled, with rods, as Prospero "binds" them, particularly the foul beast Caliban, with magic constraints. Either man then uses a Rod to restrain what is low and bestial in us. Is Tutor then, or was Tutor then, a kind of "alter ego" for the Author Function, as Prospero has long been acknowledged to be a stand-in for Shakespeare? Could it be that Shakespeare is in fact the missing Author Function? Or, is the The Author Function the true author of "The Tempest", as leading scholars, like Tom Matrullo, have long suspected? These are not questions I can hope to answer today with any certainty, since Wealth Bondage remains an enigma, but I would like to be on record, if I may, for having raised these questions and called dibs.

O my friends there are no friends! Do not grieve for the End of Wealth Bondage! Like the End of History, or nausea, it comes and goes. There is, as Dr. Johnson noted somewhere, something about the end of anything that makes us melancholy for it reminds us of our own mortality. But  - attend! - Wealth Bondage was and will always be always already over and yet never yet begun. You see what I mean?  There is no 'outside' of Wealth Bondage, no origin and no end in time or in space. Wealth Bondage reigns forever: Eternal and Unchanging and yet, like the running figures in that poem of Keats about the Grecian Urn, forever new.  Gerry, yes, this will be on the test. Class dismissed.

Hopelessly Helplessly Bound

Posted by Candidia Cruikshanks, CEO of Wealth Bondage

"Trust is good, control is better," said Joseph Stalin, and I have found that he is right.  Wealth Bondge is The World We Want, ruled by yours truly, Goddess of the Free Market. I earned it, Sweetie. If you were successful, et alia, you might rule, but you aren't, so kiss my boots. These cubicle dwellers are so cute. Like trembling little rabbits in their warren. O Revolution is coming! The rabbits will rule! I am loving it. Now wipe the slobber off the floor and get back to work.

Satire, Sermon, Masque and Anti-Masque

Indignation is the root impulse for satire. Sermon and satire go hand in hand. One urges virtue, the other excoriates vice. Satire is an elite form drawing its energies from popular forms (like Carnival, Festival, Mardi Gras, Saturnalia, Lupercal). Satire is in some ways a cyclical release and integration of potentially disruptive energies: "Venting." C.f., the American tradition of "roasting" important people. The energies of satire may actually work to solidify the existing order, by allowing a periodic inversion on special occasions reserved for that purpose. The societies that were the high point of satire were aristocratic societies building empires - Rome and Augustan England. Fool and King go together, like a man and his shadow.

Satire has its place, but beyond that so does the kind of eloquence and networking that builds a more cohesive movement, that does not end when the Feast of Fools is over, or when Lent begins, but which builds over time in a concerted (though often futile) effort at lasting change.

I really think we need both: Sermon and Satire. Satire alone, when it wells up out of the Dumpster, becomes just a venting of spleen and a substitute for constructive action.

Recently, I have been seeing progress at Gifthub and The World We Want. Satire mixed in with those is a way to reinforce a moral point, but the idea is not to deplore what is wrong, not that alone, but to do something, however small and hopeless, on behalf of the good.

Masquerade is often necessary; for many people in our society it is indispensable if they are to speak out with impunity, without reprisal. Also when you begin to depart from received opinion, and begin to come up with your own point of view, the initial results may be so aberrant that you are unwilling to jeopardize your inoffensive public identity. But as long as we remain masked, sadly, the established figures have won. They have retained control of the stage that we call "real life." We have self-censored, and self-exiled ourselves as marginal or comic figures. We are given the privilege of mouthing off if and only if we remain Clowns. We if wedded to the mask are easily beaten: "Come out and speak to us like an adult." And off we scurry into the shadows, leaving the premises, Wealth Bondage, to those currently in charge.

I am at the point where with the Author Function I am willing to take my chances in propria persona. If he stands up, I will. There is safety in hiding from the truth, but there is also the moment when the mask has become so transparent that you might as well own up to your true opinions and defend them with both modes, sermon and satire.  I am not the Author Function; I can't speak for him, nor he for me; but  I have his back and he has mine. 

The Phenomenology of Wealth Bondage

Posted by Dr. Amrit Chadwallah

If "There is no 'outside' of Wealth Bondage," can we say, then, "The limits of Wealth Bondage are the limits of my world?"

Unity in Duplicity

Posted by The Happy Tutor

Without contraries is no progression. - William Blake

Preserving the integrity of the World We Want, it appears, means excluding Fetish Action Figures, such as ourselves, as the Real People prevail in propria persona. We are more cordial here in The Dumpster out behind Wealth Bondage. Real people are welcome in the Dumpster, though masks are provided and considered good form. Read in conjunction with one another The World We Want and The Dumpster out behind Wealth Bondage are whole in themselves, but create a larger whole together, like freakish shadow puppets on the wall behind a distinguished panel of experts. What is real? Actor or shadow? Perhaps real integrity is unity in duplicity, as in William Blake's "Songs of Innocence and Experience."  Can we say, then, that there is no outside of Wealth Bondage? And for us there is no inside of The World We Want? Face facts, for us there is the Dumpster, the middle term, between Wealth Bondage and The World We Want. We are neither here nor there. Pariahs in Wealth Bondage, tossed out of The World We Want, we are lucky they let us live at all. With Hegel might we say that The Dumpster is the End of History, the receptable in which all contradictions are last overcome in pure Freedom? No, it is just our same old Dumpster, full of whatever crap they toss our way.