I received your email saying you have read every post on Gifthub.org for ten years and have not understood a blessed one. That makes both of us. Things seem to be going as planned. But, just this once, because you asked and we are friends, now with assistance from Dr. Amrit Chadwallah, Chief Adjunct in Charge of Hidden Meaning, here in Wealth Bondage, proud Sponsor of Gifthb, I will do my best to explain the set up here.
Gifthub is intentionally obscure, the meanings are hidden so the wrong people cannot understand them and get saved as St Mark says they mustn't. (C.f. Robert Frost, "Directive.") Beyond the Parables of Jesus Christ on whom I have modeled my life of Wisdom and Virtue, the models for Gifthub are The Praise of Folly, Gargantua and Pantegruel, The Dunciad and The Dunciad Variorium, Tale of the Tub, The Beggars Opera, and The Importance of Being Earnest. This is sometimes called The Carnivalesque tradition, or The World Turned Upside Down. It involves the play of many voices, none reliable (unlike in real life). A Vanity Fair. I, in the role of Phil, serve as the Omniscient Narrator, naturally. Since nothing escapes me.
As a courtesy to others and to protect myself against pushback, and payback, I try to set certain ground rules. Praise others by name, and satirize only types. Offer only one flesh and blood identity to be flayed or skewered, my own, the feckless Hack at Gifthub, who uses my name as if it were his own, but with my permission and forbearance, and with the gentle reader none the wiser.
Praise Folly in the name of Dame Folly. Enter into every vice, knavery, and folly; embrace, praise and become one with moral deformity until it becomes visible to others as their own face in the mirror, distorted. How is this working? Not very well. The only ones who read it write to say, as you did, that they don’t get it. One or two do get it and ask never to be mentioned on Gifthub, never to be quoted, never to be linked to from Gifthub, for me to never say they read it, much less say they are my friend. Never to be seen with them in public, unless at a Masquerade Ball.
The Dumpster at the Intersection of Wealth and Bondage, whose meaning you asked me to explain, is full of the classic texts discarded by the students coming home from school. The Classic Texts of Wisdom, Truth, Beauty and Virtue, are in the sacks of garbage on which Tutor and I repose. Tutor was drawn by Holbein the Younger in Erasmus's, The Praise of Folly, and is a role model for me as he is both a morals tutor and a fool, as you can tell if you look at his picture, teaching morals to a young heir, OTK. Tutor c'est moi, in my dreams. He is the man I wish I could be: Handsome, beloved, dashing, charismatic, a magnet to women, a hard drinker, a ferocious eater, a rogue, a successful charlatan, and Immortal. You could say he is my alter ego, or better self. You could say he is a figment of my imagination, or I of his.
The Dumpster, in any case, is the home of a Pariah, a Sacrificial Offering, a Conman, and wouldbe Wealth Advisor and Morals Consultant to Flourishing Families. He (the Dunce who goes by my name) has read all the right guides to working with wealth, gone to all the right conferences, and is morally insane. (Whether he was always mad, or driven mad by these conferences and deeper dives into the literature on wealth in families is an open question.)
He, the one who uses my name, "Phil," is a joke, a joke he himself will never get. He is a Worldclass Fool, who does not get that he is a Fool, or been made a fool of. How does that make him different, you might ask than many you and I might know? They would like to think he and they are very different. (Even I would like to think he and I are very different.) They are wise and virtuous and teach virtue and wisdom. Straight up. You can see it on their websites, or in their papers. He, that is to say, the "I" of Gifthub, is a pimp. So there are certainly differences. But at bottom we are all human, born of woman and will die, and the worms will eat us all, dynastic or not. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves. Fortune’s wheel is ever turning.
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