The September issue of Ex Libris Reviews is now on-line. Don’t miss Craig Clarke’s reviews!

I deal with spam comments almost every day; it’s just a fact of life. Most of them are just annoying: endless advertisements for wonder drugs and on-line gambling. But just in the last few minutes the blog has gotten dozens of truly vile spam comments, and so I’m disabling comments. These things tend to come in waves, so I’ll probably be able to re-enable them tomorrow.

There are a number of ways of thinking about social justice issues. For
example:

• Value: No one should go hungry.
• Observation: Here are some people who will go hungry if
  something isn’t done.
• Action: Let’s feed them.

This is the sort of logic that builds soup kitchens and food banks.
Here’s another way:

• Value: No one should go hungry.
• Observation: There are people in our society who do go hungry.
• Action: Let’s build a society in which no one goes hungry.

Now, this is an admirable idea, on the face of it. But how do we go
about building such a society? Practically speaking, we hold rallies and
protests and put up posters so that everyone knows that there are people
in our society that go hungry. And we lobby congressman and we circulate
petitions and we try to get out the vote in an attempt to get the
government to make sure that no one goes hungry. Mostly we talk a lot,
and the government collects a lot of money that goes to support a massive
bureaucracy that provides foodstamps to people who would otherwise go
hungry.

Now, I’m not against such a safety net. We’re a wealthy country, and we
can afford it. But I’ll point out that the logic is somewhat impersonal.
We’re no longer thinking of specific hungry individuals, but of hungry
individuals as a class. And the action we take to serve them doesn’t
feed anyone directly; it’s all aimed at getting someone else to do
the actual work.

The real problem with this logic is that it leads to magical thinking.
“We protested and lobbied and canvassed, and the hungry got fed! Wow!”

There’s a third way of thinking about social justice, one of I’ve been
noticing more and more lately, which follows from the second way:

• Value: No one should go hungry.
• Observation: There are people in our society who do go hungry.
• Further Observation: We’ve been protesting and lobbying and canvassing,
  and they are still hungry.
• Action: This must be somebody’s fault; I blame the greedy
  multinational corporations!

I often detect this way of thinking in screeds about greedy
multi-national corporations; it betrays a basic misunderstanding about
the world. There’s an implicit assumption in the above that everything
would be perfect in the world if only they (You know,
them. You’ve talked about them yourself, I’m sure.)
would stop wrecking things for the rest of us. And this, of course, is
nonsense.

Meanwhile, other people go on building and funding soup kitchens, food
pantries, half-way houses and the like. People like the folks at
Modest Needs:

Modest Needs is a tax exempt, grass-roots charitable organization
dedicated to a simple proposition: an ounce of prevention is worth a
pound of cure.

Since May 2002, the active members of the Modest Needs community have
been pooling their pocket change and investing it in the future of
working families.

These families have asked for our help because the burden of a small,
unexpected expense has proven too great for them to bear on their own.

To date, Modest Needs has kept 1264 working families from entering the
public welfare system by remitting payment for $236,215.71 worth of
unexpected expenses on behalf of the families we’ve had the funding to
assist.

Those expenses have ranged from the fee for a GED test to the bill for an
auto repair to the cost of burying a stillborn child.

Modest Needs’ average grant is just over $180.00 per family. But because our grants keep working families working, they’ve now returned more than $7.7 million in earned income to the pockets of families who have remained self-sufficient because of them.

At Modest Needs, we think our dollars make more sense when they keep families working.

I must admit that I have not researched Modest Needs extensively; they
could be snake oil salesmen. But I doubt it; when I went to their
web site and looked at their Giving FAQ, I discovered
that they don’t simply hand out money; they verify the need and they make
sure the money goes where it’s supposed to. More than that, all of their
financial data is publicly available on their web site. That’s the kind
of transparency I like to see in a charitable organization.

Why don’t you go take a look?

Charlotte Macleod, author of quite a few delightfully quirky mystery novels, has been unable to write due to sickness for some few years now. A friend, Robert Guttke, has now posted a tribute to Charlotte Macleod; it’s well worth your time. († Byzantium’s Shores)

So there this guy, see, named Ian Hamet. He boldly ventures forth to Shanghai–it’s the coming place, the leading edge of the Pacific Rim–where he hopes to get work in the movie business. Instead, he ends up teaching English for six months. And at the end of the six months, he still hasn’t found a job in the movie industry. So they offer to hire him to teach full-time for a year, only when he begins work he discovers that he’s not only the English teacher, he’s the only English speaker in the entire school. Which is brand new. Which will stand or fall with him.

Good grief, he’s not working in the movies, he’s living one. All he needs is some troubled teenagers to turn around, and maybe a beguiling love interest, and he’s all set.

Update: Apparently movie pitches should be 30 words or less. Well, that explains a few things. (For the record, Ian, it was the English division I was referring to.) Also, I’d ruled out Qili and Deliver–given how polite everyone is, I just couldn’t see the need for a baseball bat.

A friend called me up last night and asked if I’d like to go
shooting. Guns are a serious hobby of his–he used to do target-shooting
competitively. We’d talked on a number of occasions about going out to
the shooting range one weekend so that I could see what it was like, and
this afternoon we did.

Continue reading →

Life has been interesting recently, for reasons I won’t go into at the moment except to say that if you read last week’s news about the three Los Angeles parishes of the Episcopal Church who chose to secede from the Diocese of Los Angeles and place themselves under the authority of an Anglican bishop in Uganda, I don’t go to any of those three parishes. Quite. But my parish has close ties with them, and I’m acquainted with all three of their rectors. So I use the word “interesting” in the sense of the Chinese proverb.

If any of my readers would care to offer up a prayer for my parish (St. Luke’s of the Mountains) or for our three sister parishes over the next few months, I’d be greatly obliged. (Those of you are don’t believe in prayer, don’t sweat it.)

Perhaps, like the good woman at Buried Treasure Books, I’ve been putting too much effort into my book reviews. Why write a lengthy detailed review, when I could write this instead?

Of course, then I’d have to read books that lend themselves to that kind of review…

And sometimes people notice.

Amazingly, I passed four decades on this Earth without ever having read
[btitle “Treasure Island”] until just this month, when I read it aloud to
my son, David. I tried to read it once when I was a kid, but didn’t get
far; when Billy Bones was given the Black Spot I got depressed and put the
book down, having become quite attached to that sullen old gentleman of
fortune. On top of that, given what little I remember of that first
attempt, I think I might have been reading an abridgement or adaptation
of some kind; either that, or I was retaining only about a third of the
words.

Anyway, it turns out to be a fine adventure tale in the old tradition;
old, in that the pirates are indisputably bad, and the good guys
indisputably good, if not always entirely wise. It was rather
refreshing, actually. The prose was rather over David’s head, I fear,
and I was continually having to explain bits to him, but once I did he
enjoyed it thoroughly.

I think the bit that amazed me most was Long John Silver. I’d formed the
impression of Silver as your typical pirate captain, with a cocked hat
and a parrot and a pegleg, and somehow I had the notion that Silver and
Jim Hawkins went off to search for the treasure together, as good
comrades-in-arms–in short, that Silver was something of a hero.

The reality is somewhat different. Silver has the pegleg, and the parrot,
oh yes, and he goes off to search for treasure with Jim Hawkins; and
for part of the book the pirates regard him as their captain. But there’s
absolutely nothing of the hero about him. Instead he’s a quite plausible
rogue, as Jack Aubrey might say, with one eye on the main chance and the
other on the door, and if he has a silver tongue he has two faces with
which to wield it. A cunning fellow, indeed, but thoroughly contemptible.

How did I ever get the idea that Long John Silver was one of the good
guys? I really have no idea.