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Planning Holiday Festivities in the Castle

Yet ideas can be true, although men die:
For we have seen a myriad faces
Ecstatic from one lie.

            Auden, "Sonnets from China"

Among Master Jack's tribe there is a proverb, oft told, to justify Premium Services from Trusted Advisors, "Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations." Tutor has seen that cycle among upstart families, in the financial centers, and now Silicon Valley, how they rise and fall, from obscurity to wealth to folly to obscurity, or worse, and some have hired him, as Tess has, to provide a patina of culture, a touch of class, to the barbaric heirs. But that beating that proverb has not been the focus of his personal brand or business model. He follows Aristotle's theory of the polis. First democracy, then the rise of the nobles and autocrats at war with one another, then the demagogue or warrior king. The people turned against one another, while their pockets are picked, or turned against a common enemy. Then consolidated power, in king, queen, emperor, or figure like Tess who already owns a controlling interest in the world's assets, then revolution. Then over again, like shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves, but on a national or planetary scale. How to beat that proverb? Tutor is Old School and has an obvious answer. When the Leader or Owner rises above the law, when her power is the law, when she can point at the sea and say it is calm when it rages, and all agree; when she can point to night, and call it day, and all put on sunglasses, what matters is the Leader's character.  

Tutor sewed the diamonds into the vest of youngest heir of the Tsar, and protected her from that first fusillade in the death pit into which she and her family had been cast. It was he who taught geometry and ethics to the Princes in the Tower, and gave them last rites, as they slept on the night before the emissary of the new king, strangled them in their beds. It was Tutor who counselled restraint to the adolescent King Charles the Second, and taught stoicism to the young Sun King, or tried. For us, however, for our time, for our body politic, there is hope. In Audrey Tutor has found a Once and Future Queen who will rule, like Elizabeth in Shakespeare's time, virtuous and just, warlike and kind, magnificent, and beloved of nobles, tradespeople, soldiers, bankers, and shopkeepers of all sects. First among savage equals, he is a Trusted Advisor of Last Resort. Committed to wisdom and virtue, as are all the best Trusted Advisors, he and he alone is an ordained monk. He alone has taken vows of chastity, poverty, and silence, keeping one of the three for now over one thousand years. His ignoble peers, most rooted in law, banking, or family counselling, serve families to preserve them. They call that their "fiduciary standard," and deem that their "noble trade." Tutor serves the best families to preserve God's Will on Earth. 

Teachable moments for she who will rule us all: Holidays in the Castle. Pursuant to his Learning Objectives (the inculcation of wisdom and virtue) Tutor and Audrey will cook and serve a superb meal in the Great Hall to the servants and cooks, and to Seal Team Seven. Not Momma, and not Master Jack. They will neither serve nor be served, but for one meal serve themselves, as if they were middle class, who must open a can of tuna and chop celery unaided. Our future queen and her faithful Tutor will slave in the kitchen, all Christmas morning, and by 2 pm the help will roister in the hall, calling for seconds, and demanding service, drunk on wine and power, however temporary. But what will be on the menu? Tutor suggests a whole steer, roasted on a spit, or whole pig with an apple in its mouth, or peacocks or swans with feathers intact. But that would mean butchering an animal, a thought repugnant to Audrey. Tutor suggests lobsters boiled alive. And that is rejected out of hand as totally cruel. How could he even think like that? Even Rex the Rescue Dog whines at the thought.  So, they have settled on hamburgers and hotdogs. (Logic? Have I not already explained that facts are malleable to power? Stow your logic. Smile. You want a hamburger? Or would you rather starve amidst plenty?)

 

The World Turned Upside Down

When one people, perhaps better organized, with a better Leader, conquered another, erased the loser's histories, tore down its monuments, killed or enslaved the men, burned its sacred texts, raped and impregnated the women, slew the innocents, profaned the altars, then came new histories, new monuments, new laws, a new king, new coinage, new standards for a promotion, new ribbons for National Heroes, and improved standards of decency. More civilized than the savages rightly put to the sword.

When the truth is unspeakable, guilty, when it is the truth of the marginalized and subordinated, then it is best spoken without being heard, hidden in plain sight. Told in parables, fables, allegory, and jokes; overheard, not heard. Stirred up from the bottom, this is Carnival, or Mardi Gras, madness, licentiousness, the promiscuous intermixing of high and low; riot, drunkenness, abandon, the mad world of Dionysus, the god of Alexander the Great, even now in New Orleans, staged in status contest, and as good business, by the town's elite. Stirred up from the bottom (first Carnival, then Lent), it is the crucifix after the fact, held up as an object of worship - holy, holy, holy. The priest who at midnight fornicated with the mayor's wife on the altar, as the drunken crowd (including the mayor) cheered, gives the Lenten sermon in the same cathedral, and rightly so. Coming and going, both are true, just not all at once, which is why the liturgical calendar endlessly repeats, to accommodate the whole truth.

From the bottom up, the world turned upside down, what do we do with the unthinkable, the unspeakable, at least half our moral truth?  We call it art and hang it on the wall in the rich man's house. We wear britches, at times, and sometimes not. In the confessional, in a whisper, the Mayor's wife confesses her adultery, accepting penance, again on her knees. So, Wealth and The Will of God sprinkles holy water on Wealth Bondage, as priests have long blessed fleets headed off to war. On the priest's performance, no less than the whore's, Wealth Bondage, my generous patron, has built a resilient brand. May God be thanked.

Ah, Master Jack, ye knew this already, did you not? And because you do, you consider yourself Wise, having tasted the tree of knowledge, and become as a god? Such are the double-sided-truths, like the emperor's coin in the fingers of Christ, young Audrey must learn if she is to own, rule, and save, in this fallen world? That is why Tess must keep you on retainer as her most trusted advisor? Her consigliere? Secular Priest? Man of all work? Mentor to Youth? Yet, look! There Audrey is, with Tutor, hopping about like a Well Prepared Hare.  Perhaps, one day, it will be your head on the block in Tutor's dungeon, or on a raised stage as a spectacle, lesson, and entertainment for the rabble.  But, be assured, that as a Professional Courtesy, as one Trusted Advisor to another, in my capacity as the Omniscient Author Function, I will do my best to give your inevitable fall a comic turn. At least, you can be sure I will find it funny. And sometimes laughter is contagious, the best cure for the plague we spread as healers. And if you, too, smile, then all is right with the world. The laughter then passes, the wheel turns, and we can all get back to our serious business.

King Lear and The King's Men - Lessons on the Slippery Art of Family Governance

King Lear: The History Revealed by Fintan O'Toole, reviewed in The New York Review of Books.

Family Governance for Governing Families. The role of the artist, under a patron. The role of the King's Man. Support, absorb, refactor, and subvert, for the greater good. More power than a Wise Counselor in the traditional Courtier mode. More power than Parliament. Only an all licensed Fool could do more. Were I a wise man I would join Wise Counsel, giving sage advice to families as powerful as our former Monarchs, before we broke from English rule. 

The Wise make good use of literature, as of everything else. If they were wiser yet, they would be Fools. And perhaps The Happy Tutor could show them how. He is a Secular Priest, or actually a real priest, educated at Oxford as a cleric, since under Primogeniture (how our august predecessors beat the proverb, ashes to ashes, and rags to rags), he had to go into the army, become a judge, or be a priest and scholar, with a parish, or a school, or if lazy, as Tutor is, and a drunkard, and carouser, he could set up as a Morals Tutor to his noble neighbor's brats. Mentoring the Heirs, as we now say. The Happy Tutor is also the Lord of Misrule. So are our Wise Counsel, today, if by Misrule we mean the rule of the richest forever. Fool is one thing, Coxcomb, or Villain is another.

In Lear, do we pity the pauper at the base of Fortune's wheel as it turns, or the King at the top who must inevitably fall? When the highest and lowest trade places, 'handy dandy' who goes in ermine, and who in rags? Change places, and who is the thief, and who is the justice? Who is the sighted one? Who is blind?  Who is sane and who mad? Riddle me that, Wise Counsel. But more importantly, can we like Shakespeare, speak truth in riddles to power, and still be awarded our four yards of red cloth to wear the King's livery at court? So far Tutor, buck naked in a Dumpster, must await future delivery. Advantage Wise Counsel.

If I were to write my own Book on Wealth and the Will of God, I would add the epigraph: "Wiser are the Children of Darkness." And believe me, I have learned that to my own cost. Let it be a lesson to us all.

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

The Project for a New American Century  goes dark.  c.f. Ozymandias.