Wealth Bondage

Cherry Shelves

Posted by The Happy Tutor

He who read the books builds and sells the shelves. In a dumpster, he might have the books, but the shelves probably would not fit. He is living pretty high.
 

Society for Interdisciplinary Feminist Phenomenology Announces Website

Posted by Dr. Amrit Chadwallah

Continental Philosophy:

The recently formed Society for Interdisciplinary Feminist Phenomenology is pleased to announce the launch of our website.

News of the 20 scholar group is here.  I envy my fellow scholars their meeting in Vienna to discuss Beauvoir's coming of age. Here I am stuck in Wealth Bondage discussing the hidden meaning of Candidia Cruikshank's boots.  I should set up a subaltern adjuncts web site. There must be at least 20 of us in various banks and brokerage houses doing values based planning, writing speeches, doing corporate histories. My own coming of age was nothing special. Ten minutes in the back of a van for a day's pay as a grocery bagger. No conference in Vienna on that topic, I am sure.   

 

Hootch For the Homeless (Red)tm

Posted by The Happy Tutor

Help the Homeless: Buy me the Hootch at $3.95  a pop, and I will donate a nickel to the homeless by recycling the bottle! Phil at Gifthub has his doubts, but he never has turned down a hit off my bottle. C'mon, Phil, lighten up. Am I the biggest grifter in the game? Pick on someone more powerful than yourself.

The Sorry Clown at Gifthub

Posted by The Happy Tutor

Nice to see Master Phil, my protege, making good over at Gifthub.  Thousands of subscribers, invitations to all the right parties.  He has all the right moves and all the wrong reasons. I taught him all the satiric moves and how does he repay me? By providing philanthropic consulting to a global bank. Wealth Bondage encompasses us like an octopus. Did you know that is how Diogenes, the founder of our line, died? Yes, he died eating an entire octopus raw. There is a moral in that. Phil you boot kissing son of a bitch. You are a sorry excuse for a satirist. You are not even much of a Fool. Clown is more like it. You can't write satire if your number one concern is staying in good with the very people you satirize. What do they pay you so you will pull your punches?  Is it worth it, sucking up to the rich and betraying the people who throng about us when we convene Carnival in the streets? Make a choice, pal! The Dumpster or the Bank of Wealth Bondage?

Wealth Bondage as Mennipean Satire

Posted by Dr. Amrit Chadwallah

May we not say, then, that Wealth Bondage, and Gifthub too, are Mennipean satire, a disjointed, rhapsodic, prose satire, in the tradition of Diogenes? He of the Pithos, or Wine Barrel, he of the stick, with which, like our own Happy Tutor, he beat those he insulted? Earnest jest. Where have I heard that one before? Surely, it is important to be earnest as we beggars discuss philanthropy. Someone might write a light opera on that topic, surely.

Menippean satire moves rapidly between styles and points of view. Such satires deal less with human characters than with the single-minded mental attitudes, or "humours", that they represent: the pedant, the braggart, the bigot, the miser, the quack, the seducer.

The pedant? I find that a bit hurtful, candidly. But a lot of other people here in Wealth Bondage are certainly single-minded humours characters. As a Cynic, Mennippus, was a follower of Diogenes, and wrote of him. As the founder of a tradition, we find his influence in Rabelais, Swift, Diderot, Voltaire (wrote a play called Candidia, or something like that), and Master Philip Cub*ta, Equire, Morals Tutor to America's Wealthiest Families and World Class Fool.

Philanthropists accosted from a Dumpster, surely, that is a play without footlights? Naked our Contemporary Diogenes, queries the worlds most powerful people as to their identity and role. No less than did The Fool in King Lear, or Diogenes confronting Alexander the Great, The Happy Tutor teaches us to find truth in folly, folly in truth. Some may ride on horseback before a conquering army, some may ride in a bullet proof limousine, some may live in a gated paradise where nature meets culture in Ameya preserve, some may mount the hustings to make a speech, or rise in the pulpit, dressed in robes, to tell us our duty, some may bang the gavel from the raised bench to send us to the dungeon;  while some naked live on the street howling in anguish. Diogenes like a dog would defecate in the street to make a moral point. You tell me who is the "Authentic Man."  We are all human. "Pull down thy vanity, Pacquin, pull down!"

The truth is a lonely outcast, the word that must not be spoken. We angels must not be animals. When the crowd presses around us in carnival, and we are at one with the body politic, then the word is made flesh and the Boy Bishop, his pants around his knees, drinks from the holy chalice to commemorate the taking of Christ's foreskin on this The Feast of Fools. "Drink and be whole again beyond confusion!" You may find yourself, but only if you get lost.

So, let us broach the wine barrel, that Diogenes, when it is empty will have a good home. Come let us drink! What is this all but a cock and bull story, a tale of the tub?