To Stephen, "semantics"? I really don't know what you're talking about...
"uncharitable" by definition & that's NOT semantics
.
To Cris, I take it you were referring to my post... I certainly wasn't
trying to reduce anything...
.
I hesitated to say more than I did because I didn't want to run into people
saying "but this isn't what the list is about...
.
I am opposed to the charity industry. This is something that I have spent a
great deal of time thinking about, worrying at and so on. When I was
teaching I used to come up against it all the time because people would come
round with forms to fill out - how much money would I give if they did such
and such. And I was not loved for refusing.
.
I do pay ad hoc to one charity when I have any cash which is the lifeboat,
believing that official funding would destroy it and that the activity is
one of such amazing charity it needs like to fund it. That may be a fatal
flaw in my argument. I have never managed to come out of the other side of
that one. Lifeboats have mythic functions in my imagination because of
family background. I do know that in order to get money they have produced
tat with the lifeboat insignia on it which they sell at a profit and that
has always seemed to me peculiar economics at the macro level, but that's
something else.
.
Regarding Kosovo, I could say it quite simply, far too simply: NATO bombed
it, let NATO look after the victims - we pay for it either way. That sounds
inhuman (though perhaps that state would actually be a kindness - no pun
intended) but it is potentially another version, hopefully more considered,
of the cruel to be kind equation which allows the incineration of people in
the name of safety and peace, I don't see many people running to help the
people in Kosovo rushing to help the people in the rest of Serbia, so it's
an odd form of charity, selective, ideological.
.
That large numbers of people contribute to the Kosovo appeal seems to
suggest that they do not believe the NATO etc assurances that all will be
well and that everything has been planned for, yet in my experience they do
not seem to have been the same people who objected or now object to the
attack on Kosovo and other parts of Serbia. From my experience, those who
objected to the war tend to be dismissive of the appeals for help in a way
similar to mine. So there is an oddness, seemingly, whereby in one bit of
their memory some know NATO is talking bollocks and in the other they deny
it.
.
I suppose, I was still thinking about Cris's niche communities and my
objection to it. I would never have thought of Cris as pious etc; but he did
seem to be *participating in a niche. And in a way, good luck. I wouldn't
criticise charity if I was hungry and someone gave me food. I'd go in a
niche if I was hungry. But if I can avoid that, and like the man falling
from the top floor, no problems yet, *and be a non-combatant, so much the
better.
.
Yet in another way, *this kind of charity is entirely different to acts of
personal charity and not just in scale. I am doubtful how much aid gets
through and I am very doubtful how much use it is anyway. One might as well
spend money buying a sacrifice and then burning it on an altar - sending
blankets to Kosovo may function to validate the violent action which our
government took recently: You can now give to your favourite charity, at
your favourite supermarket or using your favourite credit card... to pretend
to ameliorate the damage done by your favourite military-industrial
alliance.
.
Individuals know their motivations and I don't. I wouldn't seek to guess
Cris's motives. (So I *can *only generalise because the
information isn't available.) I do know him to be highly informed,
speculative and questioning which is why I took the shot.
.
Yes, Stephen, a cold person is a cold person, as a person is a person.
Persons do not just need blankets they need not to have shrapnel in their
bodies and depleted uranium in their lungs. I do know that many who send
blankets have no problem with bombs having been dropped on people, I've got
myself in arguments with them when they have rattled their tins at me and,
not having a cat to kick, I've taken it out on them; many have accepted at
face value the muddled self-contradictory explanations for the recent
exercises with live ammunition with which Jugoslavia and other countires are
being cloacacolonised. And when you do get them to face a contradiction,
they turn away gladly saying "I don't know about that; I expect they can't
tell us everything for security... When I was young and taken regularly to a
collecting plate it was "Well, it isn't given to us to know everything
.
Cris asks who is not complicit. Very good. Unanswerable. Which of you is
without sin, let him cast the first stone. Always was unanswerable. *Yet
there are degrees of complicity; and, finding oneself complicit, one may at
least try to extricate oneself. Seeing the complexity of the entanglement
and the extremity of the situation, it may seem impossible. While we are
played endlessly that clip of a man in China defying a tank, the tanks
continue to roll and not just in China. That image is about as real as a
decent man making a new home in the west by the sweat of his brow (and of
course it was necessary to ethnically cleanse that ground). *And *yet one
can fight against complicity and it's worth the effort.
.
Charity collectors are used to people walking past them, eyes averted; but
they get very confused by eye to eye contact and someone saying "No". They
repeat their good cause. They expand upon it. They can't believe you have
said it. Maybe they are doing all they can, but I have a suspicion that all
are wasting their time,
certainly in this case. NATO is so in control, you have to make an
appointment to be protected
.
I quoted elsewhere recently SD's line from Joyce's Portrait "I said I had
lost the faith, not my self-respect" and for me that is relevant here too,
it becomes more and more relevant to everything for me, though I am not sure
how much self-respect I have left either. I cannot stop any of the insane
things which are happening by any activity that I know of and that includes
writing poetry; and yet I can resist; I can decide not to submit my
poems to books for Kosovo and not to perform for Kosovo - no one actually
offered me the chance to do the lattter! but I expect there was a slot
somewhere. All that stuff to me is musical banks.
.
Saying "uncharitable" is missing the point. Yes, just that. Because charity
too has been hijacked... It's part of the state religion, though like all of
the state religion's activities, one chooses to participate. Today, why not
undertake your favourite act of sacrifice...
.
For me the question is *trying not to be complicit. Otherwise, "we're all
guilty" becomes "it's all right because we're all guilty"

rage & doubt
L

|it's a pity that the post regarding social activism, what's in front of
|one's nose and identity politics has been reduced to an issue of what
|taking blankets to kosovo constitutes. There was a range of examples,
|deliberately intended to be dialogistic. Please don't think there was any
|attempt to be pious or be seen to be doing something good. The webs of
|complicity (familair in many everyday activities), responsibility (mediated
|in so many awkward and sometimes pernicious ways through forms and media of
|reportage), habituation, creativity are extremely tangled.

*
|Lawrence -- I would like to say your talk of complicity seems uncharitable
|with regard to Chris's efforts. A blanket is a blanket and a cold person is
|a cold person -- or do you wish to bring semantics into the nature of
|charity?












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