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Pseudodoxia (A Modest Defense of the Proceedings of the Rabble in All Ages)

The preaching of false doctrine for profit, preferment, or pleasure. When pressed beyond a certain point it is the discourse of a madman, or henchman, or political leader.  A straight faced academic account is here. Did Gulliver actually travel to Lagado? Did he really put out the fire in the Lilliputian equivalent of The White House by pissing on it? Some well meaning servants, tradesmen, and yokels at the time bought the book and believed he did. The alternative facts were marvelous news to them. Swift was happy to cash the Grubstreet check. It is hard to get satirists or sophists to speak truthfully of their lying art. It makes me wonder about Swift's sermons, too. I have often wanted to talk to Bill Schambra about it. What is the level of mental health in a DC Think Tank? What are the long term effects of immersion in pseudodoxia? Does it come with a pension? Have I been lying for free all this time, disgusted with the shrifts to which I have been driven by adversity, only to find it is now a respectable business, indispensable to the health of the body politic, and the sanity of our leader?

Alternative Facts and the Moral Truth from Neitzsche to Conway

"Tell all the truth but tell it slant/Success in circuit lies." Emily Dickinson

"Truth is a bitch who must to kennel." Lear's Fool

To live beyond truth or fact, where the waves respond to the commands of King Canute, and any mention that they don't is forbidden to the Park Service, is to reach the dead end of postmodernism, where a Kellyanne Conway, or Sean Spicer, reinvents the sophistries of a Stanley Fish.  Episteme lackeys power. Ethics, too, obviously. If postmodernism was born in Paris and Brussels under the Occupation, drawing on Nietzsche and Heidegger, what can we learn from those who went before us? We are all collaborators now.

The genres that will serve us, if will to truth still rankles, will not be the tweet, the essay, or the lyric. Satire and Tragedy, the dance of the goat, where Dionysus says, as in the opening words of The Bacchae: "I am Dionysus," and is Dionysus, because he the actor says so, in the Theater of Dionysus, at the Festival of Dionysus. And the king's head presented in the last act is confirmation. Fable, too, and allegory, and parable, still work. But if you wish to live well and prosper, and are committed to the sincere plain-style, the style of the honest man, you had better reread DeMan, on blindness and insight, and learn how sinuous and deceptive the truth-full essay must be, the moral truth, if we are to compromise ourselves with panache, and to become the hole (the aporia) through which death in life streams. When the moment of truth arrives, when self, world, and utterance align in the literal, the ritual is sacrifice. "I am Dionysus."

"The truth is a lie in accordance with a fixed convention," said Kellyanne Conway, or actually it was Nietzsche. "Facts are a mobile army of metaphors," said Sean Spicer, or actually that too is Nietzsche. The literal truth is to lie with. "Metaphors are more tenacious than facts," said Bannon. Or, actually it was Paul De Man. The only lies worth repeating are the old ones. And the best are found in Dante, Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde, fables of kings and clothes, the importance of being earnest, or the belling of a cat. We must embrace lies, and learn to lie better. I have been practicing for years, with alternative facts, alternative ethics, alternate egos. I have learned how to preach moral truth in public, at the Corner of Wealth and Bondage, so as to be never understood, and hence spared the indignity of a bully's beatings.  "Nakedness," said a mentor once, "is sometimes the best disguise." So, tweet, scribble, and blog earnestly. Friend and follow. As long as you do it from behind the mask of fool, dupe, rogue or knave. Only then, slantwise, is truth, all truth. Postpone the moment of literal truth, the moral truth, as you would your own death.

The priest who slays the goat is slain in turn. 

Reflections of a Wise and Virtuous Man on Gilded Giving, Brazillionaires, & The Inaugeration

Gilded Giving by Chuck Collins, et. al: Charitable gifts from those above $100,000 income up by 40% over ten years. From those under $100,000 of income, down 34%. From donors with $10 million of income or more, up 100%.

On another note, a new book  Brazillionaires: Wealth, Power, Decadence, and Hope in An American Country. It is about a Banana Republic, not Ancient Rome, nor the US, but it does demonstrate the worldwide appeal of Wealth and Wisdom Consulting to oligarchs: Wise Counsel about avoiding the proverb about going from Shirtsleeves to Shirtsleeves in three generations, tips on sorting values cards, and writing family mission statements with Principle, Virtues, or Values at the top where gilded Minerva stands with Bow and Arrow, down to Policies, Politics, and Procedures in the middle, and Peons at the bottom. Family Governance, in which Daughter and Son in Laws are mentored in the Art of Five Capitals, one of which is Social Capital, or the art of milking the Body Politic for Emolument, which is another Capital, along with Taste, Virtue, and Spirituality. 

On a more hopeful note, I am back home in the Dumpster at the Corner of Wealth and Bondage, where I ply my unsavory trade as Morals Tutor to America's Wealthiest Families, having watched the Inauguration in the Casino Bar, having lost a month's begging take at the slots, which are for me addictive, and self-destructive, like blogging when drunk, or hung over, like now. At least our guy won! Uppity Women are back where they belong. We the little people, the off-scourings of global capitalism, have risen again! I may be poor and stupid, vicious, mean-spirited, and a Christian, but I at least am a white man, and I can prove it.

In the Casino, patterned on a Roman Villa, with plaster statues of Emperors, Angels, and Whores, with the waitresses half naked in togas, and the free drinks, thank God!, I was wondering about Taste, under various dispensations, particularly democracy, aristocracy,  autocracy, socialism, or fascism. It seems we all have it, some good taste, some bad. As we the Downtrodden People Return to Power, it seems only right that Bad Taste will prevail, since it is the most democratic. Here, naked, accosting my betters, offering Moral Advice for free, when its true value is priceless, I am living up to my own ideals, those of the worst possible taste. (If Casinos can offer Free Drinks and Buffet, why not Wisdom and Virtue, too? You might think so, but they let the Whores in and threw me out.)

The guy in the book, the one counseling Brazillionaires, on Creating a Family Dynasty, has a fine suit, crisp tie, a good education, high motives, and excellent taste. I can only speak for myself. I am a Hack, a Stooge, Whore, Loser. I am a disgrace to our Noble Trade. I sold my birthright for a mess of potage, and now that it's gone, and I am hungry again, with no virtue left to sell, and no wisdom worldly enough to go on the market. But if someone - maybe you, Sir - could be my Patron, I could revolutionize taste, installing Casinos in place of Colleges, and a Pawnshop where once we had Town Libraries, like Greek Temples, provided to the public by Andrew Carnegie. Unless bad taste, and corruption, well counseled, by a Knave like me, prevails, how can we the people be united at last? A small donation to help bad taste grow to scale, Sir?  Your name on my Dumpster? A statue of you on a stick? Your face in profile like the Emperor stamped on a counterfeit coin.

Canvassing a fair rule set for the upcoming "Save our Country" Scapegoat Lottery

Taking "The Bacchae" as a model of healing the  body politic does have one defect. The scapegoat was the King, Pentheus, and we don't have a King. We are a democracy, leading to the need for a fair procedure for picking scapegoats, which is the purpose of this important post, created pro bono publico, by a citizen down on his luck, but hopeful of preferment, when things get better again in our messed up country. 

In the earliest myths, the priest slits the throat of the sacrificial animal, and is then stoned to death himself. Scapegoats included outcasts and pariahs, the deranged, foreigners, lepers, political enemies, and the mentally ill. But they also included wise men like Socrates and Boethius, godly men like Christ, patriots like Cicero, clerics like Saint Thomas Beckett, and Kings like Oedipus, Pentheus, Charles I, Louis XVI, and even a Tsar and his whole family. 

Given all of human history, and much of literature and political theory and practice, surely, we can all agree on the need for a steady supply of scapegoats, but we must also agree on a fair procedure for designating as many as needed. I realize that calling for scapegoats to unify a nation is a good way to become a scapegoat, even if I was not one already. By way of ground rules, maybe, we can agree to exclude any elected officials, designated Morals Tutors, or anyone who is a significant owner of property. That would narrow it down to the expendables, while keeping me (destitute as I am, and a pariah), off the bad list. I come under the exemption for Wise and Virtuous Counselor to the World's Wealthiest Families and their Puppets. (That is a long list, and I am happy to share it with any Billionaire, in or out of the Cabinet, needing a Wise and Virtuous Counselor, but the short list is either me or The Happy Tutor, and he is currently fully engaged in mentoring Audrey, our once and future Queen to Be.)

Actually, maybe we should put on the good list anyone who has read "The Bacchae" and/or Rene Girard on Violence of the Sacred, or Carl Schmidt on a body politic defined as friend against enemy; or building on Schmidt, Agamben, on the state of exception, in which democracy is abrogated during a state of emergency because only a top man can save us inside/outside the rule of law. Anyone who cannot prove he or she has read and digested at least two of these (may my feminist friends please excuse the word) seminal texts goes into the Scapegoat Lottery, unless they qualify under one of the other exceptions, like powerful person, wealthy person, male, white, of European descent, Christian, monolingual in English, or a personal friend of mine, or full-paying client for morals tutorials.  

I am not Saying to Lynch the Happy Tutor for our Sins

In the earliest rites of Dionysus, unless earlier were worse yet, the priest slit a bull's throat, and was then stoned to death by the crowd, in jubilant celebration. "Tragedy is the splitting of the ethical substance," per Hegel. Wholeness in Parker Palmer, Jung, and so many positive psychologies is a peaceful seeming circle. But tragedy finds integrity in an arc, the slash of the knife. In American history, Lincoln, soon to be assassinated, invoked the better angels of our nature; Sherman earlier having burned Atlanta. The women were made to dance barefoot in the ashes, while Union troops exulted. Sacred violence, Rene Girard called it, the corpse bleeding into the ritual chalice. "Eat of my body, drink of my blood." From such barbaric rituals, individuals, mobs, and communities are born again. 

Who among us, then, what familiar stranger, what insider/outsider, will be the scapegoat to heal our body politic? I would rather be the priest than the goat, but I fear the roles are one. Tutor is far better qualified, Dear Lord! Let his be the suffering and the expiation of our sins. He is the best there ever was, an Ancient, unblemished by time. I am a latecomer, interloper, a moral fraud. Wise and Virtuous Counselor to Fools and Knaves. I may be The Moral Tutor to America's Wealthiest Families, but he is Dungeon Master to the Stars in Wealth Bondage. He taught me everything I know about our Noble Trade. I am just his apprentice, one of many, he has taught and discarded along the way. I am not worthy to touch the hem of his garment. I am not saying my mentor, The Happy Tutor, should bleed for our sins. He is a better man than I. Burn him!, if you must burn someone. He is not here right now, but I have his new address.