Old World Swine

Pope Pius XII on What the Poor Need from Us

From an essay titled Where Are The Poor by Dorothy Day, posted at The ChesterBelloc Mandate (which has just a ton of good reading, by the way);

'We cannot conclude without mentioning that the very best charitable organization would not suffice of itself alone to assist those in need. Personal action must intervene, full of solicitude, anxious to overcome the distance between helper and helped, drawing near to the poor because he is Christ's brother and our own.

The great temptation in an age which calls itself social--when besides the Church, the state, the municipality and other public bodies devote themselves so much to social problems--is that when the poor man knocks on the door, people, even believers will just send him away to an agency or social center, to an organization, thinking that their personal obligation has been sufficiently fulfilled by their contributions in taxes or voluntary gifts to those institutions."

The poor don't very much need to stand in line at a drab, soulless, fluorescent-lit government office and pick up a check. They need money, yes, but it would do worlds more good if this help came through a friend. This is how we help the poor - not by inventing this or that new program, but by making poor friends. Not by being concerned about "the poor", but by showing concern for a poor person. This is probably the only truly effective way of doing missions, too... by making friends - true friends - of unbelievers, whether here or in some distant country.

Some Basic Economics...

Courtesy of George Will (via Newsweek). The pertinent point to ponder?...

"Who commands the millions of people involved in making a pencil? Who is in charge? Where is the pencil czar?"

Indeed, where is the Congressional Pencil Oversight Committee?

You KNOW This is Evil

This story from Reuters indicates that Australia's signature beer, Foster's Lager, a brand associated more strongly with Australia than Budweiser was with America - and that (unlike Bud) actually tastes good - may soon be purchased in a hostile takeover by Molson/Coors/Deustche Bank/Disney/Citigroup/Time-Warner/Archer-Daniels-Midland/blah, blah, blah...

A multinational beer conglomerate is just eee-vil on its face. Beer should capture the character and flavor of a region or perhaps a nation (though even going national has its pitfalls, as the Budweiser story arc suggests. Making a beer equally appealing to everyone means eventually making a beer equally unappealing to everyone).

What next... cheese? "Try delicious Stilton Cheese, brought to you by the Royal House of Saud."... 

I have tended to view the Aussies as even more proudly independent than us Americans, and that makes this (possible) takeover that much more potentially pathetic. Hopefully, I'll be drinking mostly my own brew from now on, but the very idea saddens me. Foster's also holds a certain personal nostalgia for me, as it was a favorite during my most carefree college days. I was drinking Foster's when I met my wife.

I'm not being flippant, either. This truly is is a further indication of the deep problems with unchecked and chemically pure capitalism. It can end up destroying the very things that have traditionally carried and preserved the unique tang of the local and the particular. Beer, wine, bread, cheese... these things should be different everywhere you go. The French are right at least in this; McDonald's really does suck.

A Fine, Distributist Lunch

I punched out for lunch today and, with no real destination in mind, meandered to my car and started the motor. "I guess I'm eating out, today" I thought. There must have been some of the atmosphere of the Chesterton conference still lingering in the car's upholstery, because I felt that the one thing I did not want to do was drive to one of the ubiquitous fast-food chains and pick up a grilled chicken salad (again).

So I just started driving, I knew not where. Only a couple of minutes from work, I almost passed by a little roadside restaurant I hadn't noticed before. There was hardly any indication that it was a restaurant, at least compared to most. In my peripheral vision, it had probably looked more like an auto mechanic's shop than an eatery.

It turned out to be a barbecue joint, not exactly an attractive place, but clean and friendly... the waitress called me "Hon' " in a completely natural and matter-of-fact way. The whole place was about the size of your average house. It is an easy place to miss, but they smoke their own meat out back and do a nice job of it. There were Arkansas Razorback knick knacks (local patriotism - Go Hogs!) and pictures of John Wayne on the walls. I ended up sitting at a table under a little plaque reading "Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread". A small place, doing small things, but doing them well.

Mmmm... pulled pork.

Nothing much to look at, but metaphysically speaking, a near perfect lunch.

Coffee Lovers Beg to Differ - and - Natural Foods

Reader Adam writes;

"You could do well to reconsider your cavalier relationship to coffee. It has as much potential to be made a noble brew as does beer and wine but, probably more importantly, there is a deeply unethical system underpinning cheap coffee like one often finds at the corner convenience store."

It does seem a little inconsistent for a home brewer like me to look down my nose at coffee hobbyists, don't it? Mea Culpa.

I DO enjoy my coffee, and a bad cup is an affront... there's no excuse for bad coffee. But I have not given coffee the attention that I have beer, so naturally, I don't have the most discerning palate where coffee is concerned. An average cup is good enough, and it's hard for me to imagine a coffee that would be as fulfilling (for me) as a really good beer. I could be wrong, of course. Maybe there are coffees that would make one's toes curl in ecstasy, I can't say. It's just hard to imagine, that's all.

The points about fair trade coffee are well raised in this forum, being at heart a matter touching on Distributism and social justice. I have a clandestine source of German coffee that I really like, but when that runs out, I grab the washtub-sized can of Folgers at Wal-Mart and make do.

However, I am planning a reconnaissance mission to a local natural food store (owned by one of my fellow Catholic parishioners, too) to check out their stock, and I'm betting they'll have some fair trade coffee. They also carry local milk, which I hope to use for my cheese making project. Of greatest interest to me is buying beef from cows actually (gasp) raised on pasture land and allowed to wander in the sunshine or shade, and chew the cud at their leisure... until the day they're butchered, of course. They are treated humanely, in other words. They are treated as cows, rather than meat machines, crammed into pens in intractable, sunless warehouses and machine-fed the minced remains of their cousins mixed with the crude refuse of grain processing plants and supplemented with hormones and antibiotics.

Some things are worth paying a little extra.

Mercy Me, the Blech-nology

Matt over at Pillar and Foundation (grade "A" bloggage) gave a nod to my recent post on ugly disposable culture, and I followed up a bit in his combox with the following, which I have tweaked a little;

"One aspect of the ugly/disposable culture that I didn't even touch on is the environmental impact. Ugly disposable stuff is destined for the landfill, or for this Texas-sized island of floating trash out in the Pacific that I keep hearing about.

I think it's probably a moral duty to find a way to quit doing this, to stop making and buying what is essentially trash. Local products, less packaging, better quality... I know I'm preaching to the choir, here.

There are probably numerous financial gurus who would blanch to hear people talking this way. The entire world economy seems to be dependent on American wastefulness and profligacy. Today, for instance, Wall Street sneezed and the world has caught cold. If we make too much noise about curbing our consumption and living more simply, we will likely be seen by some as economic anarchists of a sort.

Does that make me a crunchy-con? If so, do I get a secret decoder ring?"

I've given thought from time to time on what I see as the weakness in Chesterton's idea of Distributism, that is; how do you go about implementing such a program? Truthfully, though, I don't think now that "implement" is the right word. Again, such a thing will have to happen one family at a time, one street at a time. Once it becomes some kind of program or system that people are more or less made to conform to, it will become a kind of tyranny, one way or another.