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Classified: How to Stop Hiding Your Privilege and Use It

by Karen Pittelman and Resource Generation with illustrations by Molly Hein.

Classified is a guide for people with class privilege who are tired of cover-ups, who are ready to dig through the buried files and figure out how their privilege really works. Complete with comics, exercises and personal stories, Classified gives its readers the tools they need to stop hiding their privilege and instead put it to work.

Review here (caution contains obscenities) by Missy Proctor, Child of Privilege in Wealth Bondage, Dallas Division.  I will tell you this much, having spent plenty of time with wealthy heirs of the East Coast liberal-guilt variety and also with the splendiforous self-aggrandizing Dallas sort - America has a long way to go before it can boast an aristocracy worthy of the name. 

The Idea Generation and Dissemination Sector

...time/Worships language and forgives/Everyone by whom it lives" - Auden

Re: A paper (in pdf) provided by New Progressive Coalition, entitled, The Idea Generation and Dissemination Sector. What a phrase! Are we talking about ideas here, or propaganda, marketing, punditry, framing, and spin? People with ideas, whose minds are alive, teeming with unkempt thoughts, pursuing a line of inquiry  were it leads do not use these inert phrases like, "The Idea Generation and Dissemination Sector; "  bureaus or sectors with that or similar names are found in regimes not at all democratic.  When did trimming ideas for a living and calling it Idea Generation and Dissemination become an acceptable fate for a would-be intellectual? That it has worked for hacks like Shambra on the right is not a recommendation, but a sorry cautionary tale. If we keep on with this Idea Generation and Dissemination on behalf of funders who want Political Return on Investment, we too will suffer the torments of the damned as the soul and the independent intellect within us dies. (Sorry, Bill, I use you because in fact your mind is very much alive,  and you will appreciate my trans-partisan point. For you as for me the pleasure is in offering Sadistic Tutorials to the dense. Being right is out of reach for us; we lost our academic skills years ago. We settle for being annoying.)  Everyone in the think tanks are talking left and right about values, but they work in a whorehouse all the same, not that I can claim any better lineage. We are all in Wealth Bondage saying the word Freedom as we bang our heads on the bars.  Those who fund us demand "Political Return on Investment." I call that sickening. I write sermon and satire for love of country, though I admit I would be willing to accept a tip, or a good bottle of Thunderbird. 

Satire As (Non-Consensual) Surgery

As a man can  feel quite healthy, and still have a mortal illness, so with the body politic and so with our moral and spiritual life.  Satire is best conducted like surgery in the Ancient Roman manner, without anesthetic, cutting deep into the struggling patient to excise the corrupted part.  Only when the patient sees the great stinking glob pulled from his entrails will he thank us; until then, he will protest that he felt fine, and does not need our help.  Now,  you could say that non-consensual surgery is, like torture, a national disgrace and a sinful act in its own right, since it violates all norms of decency, respect for persons, and our civil rights. To which I see fit to respond: We are at War with Evil. In such a War, we must enhance the steps we to restore the moral health of  body politic and those who lead us. Dungeons are here to stay, whether those of Homeland Security or the Public Satirist.  To separate good from evil, or truth from falsity, takes the steady hand of a heart surgeon,  since corruption conceals itself in every human heart.  Nor am I exempt. Not a day goes by that I do not rue the pleasure I take in inflicting pain. But then again, who can blame me for enjoying my profession? I am doing this for your own good.