Claire E Fitzergerald shoots fish in a barrel.
Oh, she's not going to, is she? That's like, I don't know, complaining about the quality of the sidebars on Cute Overload. It's like tearing into the lack of originality in the directorial vision at the Infants' Nativity Extravaganza. It's like harshing the Guess How Much I Love You bunnies or something. No, not even that cold, cruel, callous, Clairevoyant bitch could possibly, possibly be about do that. She likes baby penguins. She can't. Can she?
Oh yes, dear reader, she bloody well can.
You see, time was when the institution of people in positions of authority acting like complete dicks for charity was very much a worthwhile exercise. Medieval urban guild-masters would do it sometimes, for example: the man who, 364 days of the year, makes it his business to go breathing down your neck to ensure you're not being too efficient or making too much money, spends one evening capering about like a comedy epileptic (well, this was before the 70s; you could say things like that back then) with a jug on his head at a "fooles feeste" and the guild gets a shiny new almshouse for its ex-members' orphans. It was the same in rural parishes; every now and again, the priest who could, very literally, put the fear of God into you and spent a great deal of his time doing just that, would go riding round on the back of a donkey singing songs about the Bishop kissing his arse (which you can still do, after the watershed), then said Bishop pays for all the poor to have a good buffet and a bit of a piss-up, the world is ritually inverted in a controlled yet empowering way, and everyone goes home happy. Ah, but look. Now it is the modern millennium. There are no all-powerful clergy or mandarin guildmasters any more, and this is generally a good thing. And yet, look again! Here, instead, is Shaun Williamson. He is murdering a Snow Patrol song in the style of a drunk man in a pub whose wife has kicked him out. He, too, is gamely acting like a complete dick. But, do you see what's wrong with this picture? Yes, that's right. It's a saturated market.
It was the same in school. I remember the great yawning gulf of cognitive dissonance clearly; it was an important landmark in the formation of the highly developed misanthrope you see before you today. The scene was our school hall. The date was the first ever Comic Relief. Some teachers were on the stage, failing to do the lambada in comedy costumes. They were clearly thinking, "Wehey, this is great! Here is me, a hugely respected pillar of my community and icon of power to these youngsters, and yet I am making a tit of myself in a good cause! Proving that I am secure in my status, good for a laugh, and generous with it! Fuck me, I rock so much!" And meanwhile, I was thinking, "Well, this is crap. I've just paid 50p to sit here and watch these people make tits out of themselves, and yet I get to do this for six hours a day for nothing."
And that's the problem it's all about the economics. Anything you do for charity has to have little or no intrinsic value, or else you'd do it anyway and most likely keep the money. That's why you'll never see surgeons doing a Sponsored Suture. Or why electrical engineers never release a Special Charity Edition Circuit Board. It accounts for the continued lack of National Turn-Up-To-Work Day. Because these are things that sane and sensible people might actually want. And so people do these things which, by sheer necessity, have to be utterly pointless (otherwise they'd be doing them already) simply to draw attention to the fact that they're Doing It For Charity and therefore Really Great. Imagine the conversation if you will:
FRIEND OR ACQUAINTANCE: Hello, Claire! How nice to see you, as always! Can I have five pounds?
ME: No.
FOA: It's not for me, it's for blind orphans in Malawi.
ME: No! I hate orphans! They piss me off almost as much as fluffy orange kittens. Go away.
FOA: But they are really deserving! They are poor, and droughts have ruined their local economy. That fiver is barely a pint and a go on the quiz machine to you, but we could use it to buy school books, or help dig a well for fresh drinking water!
ME: Well? Bah! Let them drink Hoegaarden!
FOA: I'll dress up as 1980s Madonna and sit in a bath of Noodle Doodles with a traffic cone on my head?
ME: Oh! Now that makes all the difference! Here, take the fiver! In fact, take ten! In factdamn it! Come with me to the cash machine, I'll give you everything I've got! Waiter, hold back that Labrador Puppy Biryani, I have found a much higher cause and will be giving all my money to them. Oh happy day! Oh worthwhile pointfulness!
No, you can't really, can you? That would be silly. Because no-one actually wants anyone to sit in baths of student food or anything like that (otherwiseyessss, you're catching on). And also, imagine the reverse. Perhaps I go round all my friends and acquaintances with a big bucket, dressed up as Mavis Cruet out of Will o' the Wisp, and ask them to sponsor me to travel from one end of Newport to the other in a shopping trolley pushed by my two of my kind friends here (who are dressed up as Arthur and The Moog). And they say, "Ha ha, yes! That is splendid! For what cause are you attempting this heroic endeavour?" and I say, "None, actually, I just want some money." I would be out on my ear before you could say "Fuck off!", I guarantee you.
Is there a serious point to this? Is this just wilful spleen? Well yes, actually, there is a serious point. But you have to pledge 3 to the Claire Fitzgerald Buy-Me-Stuff Trust to hear it. No? You can have a personalised newsletter from me, telling you how your donation has made a difference? Oh, alright then, you can have this one for free.
It's a dignity thing. The welfare state means that the poor and the sick don't actually, physically have to go round with begging bowls any more, and international aid programmes and NGOs are gradually bringing people round to the same basic obviousness on a macro-economic level too. Aid is a question of justice and obligation, not largesse which we dispense because we are so damn great and anyway we've got so much stuff that we can't think of anything else to spend it on. But people like feeling that nice little twinge of superiority when they give to someone else; but it's not very nice to feel superior to Malawian orphans and we know this; so we displace it onto the silly sod in the bath of Noodle Doodles; because we, obviously, are more civilized beings you can tell by the way we're not dressed up as 80s Madonna.
Someone very wise I think it might have been Jamie Oliver once said that "When thou makest thine offerings of alms, do not stand on the street corners as the pharisees do, that they might be seen by the people. Indeed, thy right hand should not know what thy left is doing." Well, I'm alright. I don't know what either of my hands are doing, because I am wearing wellington boots on both of them. The boots are full of green jelly. Now go and give some money to Comic Relief; it's a splendid organisation that funds wonderful work for extremely good causes. Just don't do anything silly.
Oh yes, dear reader, she bloody well can.
You see, time was when the institution of people in positions of authority acting like complete dicks for charity was very much a worthwhile exercise. Medieval urban guild-masters would do it sometimes, for example: the man who, 364 days of the year, makes it his business to go breathing down your neck to ensure you're not being too efficient or making too much money, spends one evening capering about like a comedy epileptic (well, this was before the 70s; you could say things like that back then) with a jug on his head at a "fooles feeste" and the guild gets a shiny new almshouse for its ex-members' orphans. It was the same in rural parishes; every now and again, the priest who could, very literally, put the fear of God into you and spent a great deal of his time doing just that, would go riding round on the back of a donkey singing songs about the Bishop kissing his arse (which you can still do, after the watershed), then said Bishop pays for all the poor to have a good buffet and a bit of a piss-up, the world is ritually inverted in a controlled yet empowering way, and everyone goes home happy. Ah, but look. Now it is the modern millennium. There are no all-powerful clergy or mandarin guildmasters any more, and this is generally a good thing. And yet, look again! Here, instead, is Shaun Williamson. He is murdering a Snow Patrol song in the style of a drunk man in a pub whose wife has kicked him out. He, too, is gamely acting like a complete dick. But, do you see what's wrong with this picture? Yes, that's right. It's a saturated market.
It was the same in school. I remember the great yawning gulf of cognitive dissonance clearly; it was an important landmark in the formation of the highly developed misanthrope you see before you today. The scene was our school hall. The date was the first ever Comic Relief. Some teachers were on the stage, failing to do the lambada in comedy costumes. They were clearly thinking, "Wehey, this is great! Here is me, a hugely respected pillar of my community and icon of power to these youngsters, and yet I am making a tit of myself in a good cause! Proving that I am secure in my status, good for a laugh, and generous with it! Fuck me, I rock so much!" And meanwhile, I was thinking, "Well, this is crap. I've just paid 50p to sit here and watch these people make tits out of themselves, and yet I get to do this for six hours a day for nothing."
And that's the problem it's all about the economics. Anything you do for charity has to have little or no intrinsic value, or else you'd do it anyway and most likely keep the money. That's why you'll never see surgeons doing a Sponsored Suture. Or why electrical engineers never release a Special Charity Edition Circuit Board. It accounts for the continued lack of National Turn-Up-To-Work Day. Because these are things that sane and sensible people might actually want. And so people do these things which, by sheer necessity, have to be utterly pointless (otherwise they'd be doing them already) simply to draw attention to the fact that they're Doing It For Charity and therefore Really Great. Imagine the conversation if you will:
FRIEND OR ACQUAINTANCE: Hello, Claire! How nice to see you, as always! Can I have five pounds?
ME: No.
FOA: It's not for me, it's for blind orphans in Malawi.
ME: No! I hate orphans! They piss me off almost as much as fluffy orange kittens. Go away.
FOA: But they are really deserving! They are poor, and droughts have ruined their local economy. That fiver is barely a pint and a go on the quiz machine to you, but we could use it to buy school books, or help dig a well for fresh drinking water!
ME: Well? Bah! Let them drink Hoegaarden!
FOA: I'll dress up as 1980s Madonna and sit in a bath of Noodle Doodles with a traffic cone on my head?
ME: Oh! Now that makes all the difference! Here, take the fiver! In fact, take ten! In factdamn it! Come with me to the cash machine, I'll give you everything I've got! Waiter, hold back that Labrador Puppy Biryani, I have found a much higher cause and will be giving all my money to them. Oh happy day! Oh worthwhile pointfulness!
No, you can't really, can you? That would be silly. Because no-one actually wants anyone to sit in baths of student food or anything like that (otherwiseyessss, you're catching on). And also, imagine the reverse. Perhaps I go round all my friends and acquaintances with a big bucket, dressed up as Mavis Cruet out of Will o' the Wisp, and ask them to sponsor me to travel from one end of Newport to the other in a shopping trolley pushed by my two of my kind friends here (who are dressed up as Arthur and The Moog). And they say, "Ha ha, yes! That is splendid! For what cause are you attempting this heroic endeavour?" and I say, "None, actually, I just want some money." I would be out on my ear before you could say "Fuck off!", I guarantee you.
Is there a serious point to this? Is this just wilful spleen? Well yes, actually, there is a serious point. But you have to pledge 3 to the Claire Fitzgerald Buy-Me-Stuff Trust to hear it. No? You can have a personalised newsletter from me, telling you how your donation has made a difference? Oh, alright then, you can have this one for free.
It's a dignity thing. The welfare state means that the poor and the sick don't actually, physically have to go round with begging bowls any more, and international aid programmes and NGOs are gradually bringing people round to the same basic obviousness on a macro-economic level too. Aid is a question of justice and obligation, not largesse which we dispense because we are so damn great and anyway we've got so much stuff that we can't think of anything else to spend it on. But people like feeling that nice little twinge of superiority when they give to someone else; but it's not very nice to feel superior to Malawian orphans and we know this; so we displace it onto the silly sod in the bath of Noodle Doodles; because we, obviously, are more civilized beings you can tell by the way we're not dressed up as 80s Madonna.
Someone very wise I think it might have been Jamie Oliver once said that "When thou makest thine offerings of alms, do not stand on the street corners as the pharisees do, that they might be seen by the people. Indeed, thy right hand should not know what thy left is doing." Well, I'm alright. I don't know what either of my hands are doing, because I am wearing wellington boots on both of them. The boots are full of green jelly. Now go and give some money to Comic Relief; it's a splendid organisation that funds wonderful work for extremely good causes. Just don't do anything silly.
