The Following essay is a Response to item #9 found on our List Page
RJ Ritchie
Dear Karyn’s gel-headed, Creatine-guzzling boyfriend,
My misguided colleague’s broadside against savekaryn.com is just another sad reminder of the reactionary obstacles that a truly visionary entrepreneur must overcome. Even in this pioneering business age, radical ideas are often met with skepticism and scorn; and yet, it is in this smithy of controversy and conflict that Promethean change is forged. I only hope that Karyn can take cold comfort in this and continue her efforts to reinvent the business of panhandling.
Karyn has served notice—Panhandling has entered the New Economy. The romantic clochard is out and the bourgeois bum is in. And isn’t it about time for a paradigm shift in this timeworn sector? Begging for change on grimy city streets in soiled rags is oh-so-twentieth-century. Scrawling on a shard of corrugated box with a sharpie is no way to connect with or grow your audience in this Digital Age. And still countless tatterdemalions slavishly adhere to this brick-and-mortar strategy. But not Karyn: she broke with these entrenched traditions and is revolutionizing the way beggars do business. In doing so, she has not only given indigents the world over a sure-fire blueprint for prosperity, but she has also given them a cause for hope.
First of all, Karyn has shown the impoverished the value of image management—the iconic image of the Skid Row wino was in desperate need of a makeover, and Karyn delivered by, among other things, eschewing the drab blacks and grays we usually associate with destitution and splashing her site with jazzy, eye-catching pastels. Her prettified aesthetic brings cache and hipness to a milieu once dominated by despair and squalor. In hindsight, this iconoclasism is just plain commonsense. Which panhandler would you rather patronize—the blasé, Kmart stumblebum of old or the chic Tar-zhay solicitor of the Information Age.
Karyn also commercialized panhandling by introducing it to the platform of electronic commerce. Just think, now bums can solicit alms from their home office without ever having to get out of their pajamas. Of course, most panhandlers have neither homes nor pajamas nor a computer nor disposable income nor a pot to piss in, but that’s beside the point, imagine how convenient it will be for those who do!
And lastly, and probably most importantly, Karyn has demonstrated that the best way to appeal to the public’s eleemosynary instincts and generate revenue is to show potential donees that you don’t really need their money. The one element that has long been absent from the traditional transient tableaux is humor—beggars have long been an unironic lot. That’s about to change. Karyn’s tongue-in-cheek approach is the “special sauce”—the Postmodern edginess—that begging has long lacked. The runaway success of her unrepentant flippancy and brazen materialism has uncovered a fundamental societal truth that will change the way we approach charity: Largesse for the deserving poor isn’t nearly as clever as handouts to the undeserving middle-class. Once Karyn’s revolution is brought to its logical end, the Red Cross will cease to solicit donations for victims of natural disasters and begin scrounging for yuppies who are locked into cost-inefficient cell phone contracts or corporate officers whose third marriages are being unduly burdened by alimony payments. A new era has dawned.
So, as Karyn’s boyfriend, I want you to encourage her to stand tall against small-minded critics who blast her receipts as an ill-gotten subsidy for a life of gross consumption and assert that she is a karmic cousin of able-bodied sloths who park in handicapped spots. Tell Karyn to let those pencil-necked naysayers split moral hairs about the justness of taking money from people saddled with larger debt loads (from student loans, mortgages, etc.) than her for the sole purpose of bankrolling her shopalism. Let her conscience be untroubled by these undeserved slights, after all, she’s got a credit card bills to pay with my money, and a world to change.