Gift Hub

Moral Remedies: Jesus Saves? Satire Saves? - A Back to Back Test

Born Again? Or the Secular Cure? I have tried both, as part of my Professional Training as a Morals Tutor to America's Wealthiest Families. I can attest that the Born Again thing is quicker, cheaper, and makes you feel better fast. For purposes of expunging the record, if you have committed atrocious sins, as I have,  it works great. For real moral reform, though, there is no substitute for the Moral Rehab accomplished with Secular Means.  Yes, it hurts, but the results are lasting. When being sanctimonious is no longer enough, I am here to tell you: Satire Saves!

Glad to Be Back: Rehab Went Great

Some say my approach to the philanthropic advisory business, positioning myself as a Morals Tutor to America's Wealthiest Families, is idiosyncratic, but we are all formed by our personal experiences. I was once morally insane. I believed that philanthropy was a capital market. I believed that what matters most can be measured and managed. I saw double bottom lines, then triple, where others saw only one. I pursued wealth. I thought I was on some kind of journey from success to significance. I began to give money away.  Thank God, my friend and mentor, the Happy Tutor, Dungeon Master to the Stars, forcibly intervened. After a few weeks in rehab under his hands, I was a new man. So, since Tutor is no longer taking Private Wealth Clients, I have adapted his methods of nonconsensual morals tutorials to a more general audience.  My fellow Philanthropy Advisors! As I have benefited from Moral Rehabilitation, so I hope you and your Private Clients will as well.

Curing Philanthropy

Horace, the great Roman satirist, the most well-mannered of men, a friend of Maecenas and Emperor Augustus, suggested that poetry "should mingle the sweet and the useful," as does the nursemaid or doctor who sweetens harsh medicine with candy. I wonder if ExLax is the kind of thing he had in mind? Probably, but he was too urbane to say so. His humor is sometimes quite dry. Anyway, I hope satirizing Philanthropy will help the field be a little less constipated.

Comment Policy

General Policy

Commenters are responsible for their own comments.  Generally comment moderation is turned off, and we run "wide open." 

Comment Moderation as Exception

As host, I am responsible for making each person feel welcome, heard, and sometimes forgiven.  I welcome (cherish) dissenting opinions, experimental prose styles, masquerade, carnival, satire, as well as sweetly reasonable discourse. I actively encourage people with points of view other than my own. I feel this is mission critical to an open society.  Out of such deeply held, emotionally charged differences come new insights, new friendships, and sometimes new alliances, coalitions, and communities.

When people from different walks of life, who do not know one another, discuss sensitive issues the conversation may become inflamed. People may go from wit to insult and from insult to acrimony.  Instead of treating others as we would want to be treated, we bring our "shadow side" to the conversation. 

My role is to make this a good place for open-ended conversation that leads through energy and uproar to new insights and to new civic friendships. In rare instances I will moderate comments and withhold those that in my judgment foment rancor and bitterness.  I prefer people to use a live email address, even if you use a pseud, so I can contact you behind the scenes to keep everyone smiling.  (Like everything else here, the comment policy is open to discussion and revision.)

Personal and Business Rationale

I believe that it is generally best to hate the Sin and love the Sinner, hate Folly and love the Fool, and even to hate Knavery and love the Knave.  If we begin to hate sinners, fools and knaves, where would that leave me, as a born again Dungeon Master to the Stars? We would be driving away the very clients on which we depend for our daily bread.  We may as well welcome Fools since we are one .

Tom Matrullo on Democracy and Nobility

Thank you, Tom, for your reading of Gifthub and your friendship. "What can I do," he writes,

I know none of this helps. What can we do -- that's not a rhetorical question. You are asking important non rhetorical questions. What can I do that might be of use?

Well, it helps to know that even one literate person is listening. All we can do is keep one another company and speak what we know as the crowd (the demos) mills past oblivious.

RE: Candy's Column

To the far right you will now notice Candy's Column, courtesy of our Corporate Sponsor, Wealth Bondage.  In return for renewing our funding for 2008, Candidia Cruikshanks, CEO of Wealth Bondage, asked for a column in which she and her Senior Fellows can comment on Philanthropy and Civic Comity, as her way of giving back to  humankind. At first I hesitated to oblige. Candy's diction, salted as it often is with Anglo-Saxon expletives, is not always what I would prefer, in a family-oriented site devoted to giving.  But I suppose if you are one of the most successful people in the universe you can pretty well say whatever you want, however you want.  In any case, when I refused to give Candy her column she said, "Look, Jackass, unless you give me that Column and kiss my boots, I will not only cut off your funding, I will cut off your nuts and chop them in a blender." Needless to say, I was unmoved by such threats, but upon deeper consideration I thought it was only fair to honor my funder's respectful request. If you find the whole subject of Wealth Bondage distasteful, I suggest you simply ignore the third column to your right. What we don't see can't hurt us. Consider the frame itself to be invisible and every thing should seem perfectly normal. I did not kiss her boots. I merely nuzzled them. My self respect and editorial independence are intact.

 

Choosing Democracy Consciously

"Existential choice," that phrase in Paris after the WWII had meaning, as people thought back to the Occupation and how they had handled themselves as bystanders, soldiers, collaborators, resistance fighters. The question was, "Do we make decisions that stem from our character? Or, do we create ourselves, our character and our identity, through the life determining choices we make?" Sartre said that our choices, even if made unthinkingly, even if made in bad faith, determine who we are. We might say then that philanthropic consulting at its highest works with a donor, or donor family, not only to express character, values and identity, but to forge same in the heat of public action. I see the work of H. Peter Karoff in this light.

But there is more, as the political element in the discussion above suggests. The most important choices for a society are not individual. Will Paris resist? Will my editor resist or cave? Will my neighbors support me or turn me in? Can I assume that the walls have ears? Will I be taken off the street and tortured? Will I betray my friends? Group choice largely trumps personal choice. The choices we have as a society and a nation go beyond choices of brands, parties, or personal paths through a maze set up by those above us. We have a collective choice about what we as a nation are becoming. Sleepwalkers or a free people? That for example and the choice of whether to constrain ourselves and govern ourselves for a sustainable future. That for example. Likewise we have choices around the rule of law, transparency of government, wiretapping, torture, martial law, detention centers, propaganda, think tanks, punditry, regulation/deregulation, and the concentration of power in the hands of the few. To accept these as given is a personal choice. To change the decision matrix within which personal choices are made can only be a collective choice, a choice offered by no party or candidate you could find in the voting booth. The world we want is not sold in stores.  The world we want is not on the ballot in any given November.  We cannot create it one by one, only when many act in concert.

We can make collective choice as cows do, turning their hindquarters to face the wind, or as birds or schools of fish do, taking their cue from one another in flocks. We can make decisions as consumers do, responding to brand signals, and the smiling faces in the ads, or as party members do, mouthing the sound-bites and the slogans.  We can respond to which end is up, as defined by those above in a position to reward or punish. Or, we can come to consciousness through philosophy, the arts, history, reliable news, and small group conversation in which we winnow the good from the bad, the true from the false, and art from spin.

Are we talking political theory? Philanthropy? Grassroots organizing? Media reform? The arts? Blogging as consciousness raising? Game theory? The theory and practice of  eloquence? Heroism? Reform of the operating systems of capitalism? I want to say for better or worse that at Gifthub we are talking about all this as one conversation. We are talking about each of us personally and we collectively snapping out of our fog and becoming conscious of where we are in history, finding shared stories and language, creating rallying points, and once again taking responsibility for the fate of our society and the earth. Philanthropy as currently practiced may be a small part of it, but love of humankind, the root meaning of philanthropy, is of the essence.  I am going to ask my boss and distinguished patron, Candidia Cruikshanks, if it is ok to be a citizen. You wait here. I will be right back and  tell you what she says.   

The Importance of Being Earnest in Blogging Philanthropy

Butts in the Seats (via Tactical Philanthropy) is concerned that I may be a man at war with himself.  My wife is also concerned, although mostly about Senator Dick Minim (D MA), my consort and common law husband, with whom I have shared a Dumpster for the last 30 years or so, since he was dismissed from Yale for consorting in the Men's Room in Linsley Chitteden Hall with a common Dungeon Master to the Stars, while I coincidentally was out on parole from the Walpole State Penitententiary.  (I have done my time and paid my debt to society.  I have not flogged a wealthy person, except pro bono and consensually now in over 35 years. Even then I was framed. The John asked me for it. I am off the sauce now more or less, and have a respectable job as the editor of Gifthub: Blogging Philanthropy.)  Here I try to keep things on the up and up. Generally, when your giving site is sponsored by Wealth Bond*ge it is best not to ask too many questions. It is all good.

Seriously, the technique of vilifying myself  to gain publicity is modeled on Danial DeFoe who would adopt a pseudonym to attack his own books in the most vicious terms to gain publicity and sales.  Blogging is as close to Grubstreet as you can come in America's corporate owned and controlled media culture.  Let us revel in our ability to make Fools not only of ourselves, but also of our unwary readers, and of the corporate style sites we can impersonate with a serious mein, whether that of Knave or a Dupe.

After decades out of teaching, most of it on the street as naked as Diogenes, literacy is still my main concern. I write here as an earnest ninny ("the nice man at gifthub"), simpering about philanthropy, and hoping to gain a wide readership among kindred spirits.  So far it is working.  It is a huge market. We get new ninnies every day who are unaware or unconcerned that this site is a public  facade for an infamous Bond*ge Bordello, a way of cleansing the dirtiest and wealthiest hands in America. Worse this site is the phony charitable mouthpiece for Rooster Foundation: Crowing in the New American Century, funded by a high priced hooker with a Harvard MBA, and staffed by the kind of perjured policy intellectuals who advocate smaller government, self reliance among the poor, and voluntary action for the common weal, in lieu of taxes, thereby freeing themselves to contribute zero.

As I said, I am Phil Cub*ta. This is Gift Hub: Blogging Philanthropy. And, "It is all good."

Moral Education for those in Bondage to Wealth

"On Phil Cubeta and the moral education of fundraisers," by Gayle at Fundraising for Nonprofits. My writing is intentionally "hard reading." My master is Jonathan Swift, an Anglican Preacher, and some would say an insane person who wrote satire. His message is simple, the message of the gospels. Mine is too. I write as a good consumer and producer, as a loyal subordinate in a business hierarchy, as a toadying wealth coach, for others of my own kind - the complacent, the self-serving and the corrupt. I pretend to be a genial fool here at Gifthub, to engage you, dear reader, on your own plane, in the style of courtesy and felicitous persiflage to which you are accustomed from your life as a consumer. At The World We Want, I am the inoffensive idealist, a fool among knaves. At Wealth Bondage I, The Author Function,  and his imaginary friends pretend to be morally insane, to befriend and bond with those who are. In passing I pretend variously to be a whore, a sadist, a dupe, a happily married homosexual, a homophobic leader of a motorcycle gang, a  family-oriented torturer for the National Security Administration, a social venture entrepreneur in the Bondage Bordello Business, a knave, a religious zealot, a bigot, a fraud, a spoiled heir, a full-breasted newscaster, a philanthropically-inclined Senator (D) from MA., a hack from a right wing think tank, a  shrewd sales person, a dull-witted business man among others, or a semi-illiterate professor of English Language and Literature, to engage as an equal with my diverse audiences and to dramatize our ways of life, our ways of speaking, our ways of deceiving ourselves and one another, and to "make them strange," as Brecht said art must.

"But what has this to do with philanthropy?" asks the bewildered reader. "This man at Gifthub is not nice." Yes, as the Tutor would say, "Bend over lady and let's pretend that this is your birthday. Even at your age moral instruction can be effective, if applied with vigor. Your tears and whimpers are a harbinger of moral change. See what I mean by the joy of giving? Now hold still. This hurts me more than it does you. I would be doing you a disservice to let you go through the rest of your life with such a high regard for your precious self.  Spare the rod and spoil the citizen. The quicker you break, and ask forgiveness, and pledge to reform, the quicker this will all be over." May I too be forgiven in my turn.

Thanksgiving 365

Top 10 Sources:

The following ten sources offer some great information about philanthropy, helpful tips on charitable giving, and creative ways to volunteer. In the spirit of the season, we offer these blogs, podcasts, and websites for you to explore what others are doing to better the world and to learn how to get involved. Happy Feasting!

I'm flattered to be included; I wonder if it will drive much traffic. I also wonder about the eventual business model. Does the content flowing from here to Top 10 as a gift then get packaged in some way at some point with ads, or for a subscription? How does Halley Suitt et. al. make this into a self-sustaining social venture with a double bottom line - one for them, one for society and none for me? Web 2.0 is wonderful.