Circle Magazine review of "Talk Your Way Out of Credit Card Debt"
by
Victoria Acroyear |
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I
feel sorry for all of you poor bastards out there crippled
with credit card debt, and even sorrier that I never had the
opportunity to join you. Ever
since I conveniently blew off my education loans a few years
back, no sane lender would touch me with a ten-foot
electrified APR. I have precisely one credit card -- the
ultra-rare and super prestigious American Express Aluminum
Card. My limit is fifty bucks. I buy three a.m. pizzas with
it from time to time. In a society whose voodoo economics
are founded upon the very concept of cyclical personal debt,
I am the perennially non-solvent outcast. So how am I not
living in a cardboard box beneath an overpass, you
ask? Because I
get paid the hefty pocket salad under the table for doing
that which no other reviewer would deign to do, which is
provide an aesthetic review of Scott Bilker's Talk Your Way
Out of Credit Card Debt. Now, before I start singing the
praises of Mr. Bilker's prose style, or his innovative use
of trochees and spondees in the anapestic diptych (or
whatever), I must admit that when I picked up this nattily
turned-out trade paperback, I wasn't exactly expecting
William Morris's The Life and Death of Jason, which was all
to the good, as I didn't get any epics between these covers.
(All sexual innuendo aside, I rarely do.) What
I did get was a surprisingly witty and to all appearances
effective how-to manual for hoodwinking these bloated social
parasites that we now know of by the euphemism
"banks" into cutting us a little slice of economic
justice now and then. Granted, the power is entirely on the
side of the large financial institutions, such that Mr.
Bilker's winning tactics often shed their savor of victory
in a larger context. In
fact, after sober reflection, much of the content of this
book comes off like a prisoner in an Aztec sacrificial
dungeon winning a reprieve from the old heart-yanking
business and getting off lightly with a refreshingly simple
full-body flaying alive, instead. Any time one of us poor
microserfs (to use Douglas Coupland's once-famous neologism)
has any sort of dealings with the money monolith that drains
us, we're going to lose -- that can't be helped, that's the
way the system was designed to work by those whom it
continues to benefit. But at least with the help of Mr.
Bilker's book, one can fight a series of strategic rearguard
actions, and manage to cut one's losses a bit. After
all, there's no sense in completely rolling over and playing
dead -- before it's time, anyway.
--End--
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