A Town Called Alice

[alice wellintown]

What does the phrase "taking care of business" mean in IV? I provided
my definition and provided text support (with page numbers). Moreover,
I've taken a position and defended it.

Position: the characters in IV fail to take care of business.

Meaning of the phrase: the phrase comes from Dickens' _ A Christmas
Carrol _  and means, take care of our fellow humans. In other words,
as Marley tells Scrooge, "Mankind is our business." The good Work that
the characters should be doing, their (Blake's term) "Christian Duty",
their obligation (Melville's terms) to "Lazarus on the curb" , to
"Bartleby in the Tombs", to their Brothers, is not getting done. While
some pretend and even aspire to altruism, some malevolent force of
egoism keeps changing the channel making actors and addicts and
selfish Tube toxic children of most of them. The malevolent force
strips away privacy that, ironically, drives the characters to seek
fame or celebrity or at least an audience that often includes a
solipsistic voyeur--themselves. This is evident in CL49 and in VL.

Capitalists assume/promote the idea that people will/should act in
such a way as to promote their own interests. It's not a matter of
what is normative nor is it a matter of describing how people do act,
but an assumption used to calculate inherent vice.

Of course, the reason Micky Wolfmann is so dangerous to the Capitalist
Establishment is that altruistic "business" would yield outcomes at
least as good and probably better than the Capitalist stochastic
model.

But that's not a credit default swap JP Morgan Chase & Co. want to underwrite.