Loose Canon Archive: December 2004

Blame America First!

December 30, 2004 | 4:45 p.m.

Guess what, folks: George Bush and the evil United States didn't cause the tsunami. Without the U.S.'s generosity, those who suffer so grievously in that region would suffer even more. That's hard for the knee-jerk Bush hater to accept, and they're searching high and low for some way to blame the president (including his having the audacity--the gall! the insensitivity!--to go ahead with his inauguration) and the United States for something--anything--related to the tragedy in Asia.

Though the tsunami brought us stories both of horror and of kindness, "Not everyone distinguished himself,"

writes Peggy Noonan

. "What to say of those who've latched on to the tragedy to promote their political agendas, from the U.N. official who raced to call the U.S. stingy, to the global-warming crowd, to administration critics who jumped at the chance to call the president insensitive because he was vacationing in Texas and didn't voice his sympathy quickly enough? Such people are slyly asserting their own, higher sensitivity and getting credit for it, which is odd because what they're actually doing is using dead people to make cheap points."

Andrew Natsios, the head of US Agency for International Development,

lauded our generosity last night on the Newshour

with an incredulous Gwen Iffil. It was a terrific interview. Natsios--who seems to be that rara avis: an international bureaucrat who doesn't look down on the United States--particularly addressed fellow U.N. bureaucrat Jan Egeland's slurs about U.S. stinginess:

NATSIOS: I have written books on this. I've been doing this work for 15 years. Jan Egeland is a friend of mine; we're the biggest donor to fund his office and his staff.

I called him and said, Jan, what are you talking about? He's talking about development assistance, not disaster relief. For disaster relief, it's simply nonsense. He doesn't know what the data shows.

If he did, he wouldn't have made that comment. He told me he was misquoted and he was speaking about development assistance.

What he did not know is that President Bush has arranged the largest increase in development assistance since Harry Truman.

The budget when Bill Clinton entered office for ODA, Official Development Assistance, which is an international formula used by 27 countries that are donor governments, was 10.6 billion dollars. In 2003, it was $24 billion.

You've had a 140 percent increase. We're well beyond what the president committed at Monterey and at Johannesburg. There is a huge effort to combat HIV/AIDS, the millennium challenge account. My food aid budget has been increased hugely.

So Where Was God?

December 30, 2004 | 4:45 p.m.

A lot of people, including my colleagues at Beliefnet, have been trying to fathom the theological meaning of the horror in Asia. As

Janet Daly notes in the Daily Telegraph

:

"Natural disasters make the best case for unbelief because they are not even susceptible to the theological explanation of human evil - that without the capacity to make immoral choices, men are not truly free: the ability to do good would be meaningless if we did not also have the ability to do evil.

"The whole point of the human condition is to choose to do what is right rather than what is wrong. But an earthquake has no motive and no free will. It just is what it is. A tsunami does what it does. It sweeps away the blameless and the helpless without reason. So where is the divine purpose in that?

"In fact, there is no logic in the sceptic's argument - or, at least, not the logic that he assumes. If terrible events are to constitute evidence that God does not exist, then every wonderful event - every cured cancer patient, every child rescued from a fire - has to be evidence that He does. The unbeliever would, by his own reasoning, have to accept that all the fortunate things that have ever happened were proofs of God. Not that the rising number of unbelievers is linked to rationalism.

"Strictly speaking, what The Daily Telegraph poll showed this week was not an increase in unbelief but in non-belief. It is not so much that people have consciously discredited the notion of faith, as that they have ceased to care about it."

Daly does not solve the theological problems of the tsunami, but she does conclude that the current apathy about God eats away at our civilization--and our selves:

"Like so many things in modern British life, agnosticism is not a function of deliberation and reasoning, but of apathy and indifference. We don't positively repudiate the idea of God, just as we don't positively reject the idea that politics can be of any use. We just don't give a damn.

"This is not scepticism in the proper sense, which involves conscientious questioning of beliefs - an insistence on investigating received opinion which might, in the end, result in acceptance. It is something much more corrosive and incurable: a detachment from any abstract or profound understanding of life and its meaning. It is a cynicism that refuses to dwell on any but the most immediate satisfactions and concrete rewards."

Lady Marchmain Would Be Jealous

December 30, 2004 | 4:45 p.m.

Relapsed Catholic

, one of my favorite blogs, spotted this gem on

GetReligion

:

"So the lavish Sawbridgeworth, England, estate of soccer megastar David Beckham and his wife, Victoria--formerly known as pop tart 'Posh Spice'--contains its own private chapel. Who knew?

"This is merely one of the too-good-to-be-true details in a recent USA Today story by reporter Cesar G. Soriano that could open up an entirely new niche for professionals on the Godbeat. Weddings are old hat for the paparazzi and gossip columnists. Now the super rich and fabulous are hitting a new stage of life--celebrity-party christenings."

Stop the Madness!

December 30, 2004 | 4:45 p.m.

Loose Canon is on record (several times) as saying that it's madness to try Saddam Hussein--the court system wasn't meant to handle such situations. Neither Churchill nor FDR originally favored holding trials for evil Nazis. Shoot him, hold him in prison, whatever. But don't try him.

This is all so ludicrous that you knew that sooner or later former attorney general Ramsey Clark had to surface.

Here's what the Rammer (thanks to

Midwest Conservative

for the nickname and spotting the interview)

told Al Jazeera

:

"[Clark] said in the Jordanian capital Amman that his principle concern was protecting the former president's rights, who only saw a lawyer for the first time this month - a year after his capture.

"'In international law, anyone accused of crime has the right to be tried by a confident, independent and impartial court, and there can be no fair trail without those qualities,' he said.

"'The special court in Iraq was created by the Iraqi governing council, which is nothing more than a creation of the US military occupation and has no authority in law as a criminal court,' he said."

It's Still Christmas!

December 30, 2004 | 4:45 p.m.

No, it can't be Christmas every day. But, according to the Christian calendar, we're still in the Christmas season. Joseph Loconte, religious scholar at the Heritage Foundation, has a

fascinating little essay

on how both liberals and conservatives have always been eager to enlist the man born in the manger for their causes:

"Even today, nearly everyone wants Jesus on his side of an argument. But the babe in the manger, the man worshipped as Deity by millions, goes his own way - and bids that we follow."

By the way, this will be the last blog entry for 2004--best wishes to all for a happy new year. See you in 2005.

What Powell Should Have Said

December 29, 2004 | 5:35 p.m.

You'd think that when a

natural disaster of epic proportions

ravages a region and kills around 60,000 people, U.N. officials would have better things to do than use the horror to damn the United States. But you'd be wrong.

Not surprisingly, it was a U.N. official, Jan Egeland, Undersecretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, who has been foremost in the attack on the U.S. Egeland seized on the tragedy to call the U.S.'s relief allocation "stingy."

Secretary of State Colin Powell responded that the United States "has given more aid in the last four years than any other nation or combination of nations in the world." Powell needed to express more outrage with Egeland. What should he have said? An

editorial in the New York Post

has sage (if belated) advice for the secretary:

Rather than simply defending America's record, however, Powell might have more effectively suggested that if Egeland is searching for some serious money, he should simply pass the hat among his fellow U.N. officials.

What we should be lamenting in not false accusations of U.S. stinginess, but red tape that apparently makes it hard for international aid to get where it's needed.

Asia News

quotes Bishop Kingsley Swampillai of Trincomalee and Batticoloa in Sri Lanka on the subject:

"So far we have not received government aid that would normally be provided in such a situation. We hope it will come soon. 90% of survivors have lost everything of their homes which were constructed along the seaside, so they will be here in the welfare centres for some time. The government must make some plans for relocation."

Bishop Kingsley said much time and paperwork was needed for international aid to reach the area, which it had not done so far.

Don't get me wrong-I'm glad that the U.S. upped its contribution. I just wish that some organization less corrupt than the U.N. were in charge. If you'd like to help privately, Beliefnet provides

a list of organizations

accepting donations to help tsunami victims.

Speaking of good deeds, I talked to somebody who's going to visit wounded soldiers at Walter Read, and he was told that there are two things that they really appreciate: long distance calling cards and gift certificates for Subway and other restaurants that have outlets inside the hospital. These might make nice gifts for anybody who wants to do something for those who have done so much.

Camping in Eternity

December 29, 2004 | 5:35 p.m.

For those who, like me, are fans of the obituary as an art form, the death of Susan Sontag, the wrong-thinking public intellectual, should keep us busy for days. From the Sartre-quoting

Le Monde

to the

New York Times

("Social Critic with Verve"), Sontag's obituaries have been predictably hagiographical.

While her celebrated and long-ago essay on camp may have been fairly harmless, her overall influence on American intellectual life was, as Martha Stewart might put it, not a good thing.

Charlotte Allen

of the Independent Women's Forum notes:

She was almost single-handedly responsible for all the bad intellectual fads that came out of the 1960s and are still with us: pornography as high art; "camp" as something more significant than the gay subculture's fondness for Judy Garland; the tiresomely 'ironic' stances on everything that are now de rigeur among artists and academics. From Jonanthan Franzen to Al Franken--they're all Sontag's moral children. Worst of all--and very much alive--is the Sontag-generated notion that America is the most fearsome tyranny on the face of the earth and that anyone who would seek to destroy America, from Fidel Castro with his Soviet-supplied missiles to the terrorists who plowed the planes into the World Trade Center towers, deserves a hero's medal.

Writing in the New Criterion,

Roger Kimball

--

my

favorite public intellectual--has this to say:

Never mind that a lot of [Sontag's work] was literally nonsense: it was nevertheless irresistible nonsense. It somehow didn't matter, for example, that [Sontag's] whole notion of 'an erotics of art' was ridiculous. Everyone likes sex, and talking about 'erotics' seems so much sexier than talking about 'sex'; and of course everyone likes art: How was it that no one had thought of putting them together in this clever way before? Who would bother with something so boring as mere 'interpretation'--which, Sontag had suggested, was these days 'reactionary, impertinent, cowardly, stifling,' 'the revenge of the intellect upon art'--when we could have (or pretend to have) an erotics instead?

Kimball quotes from "Susie Creamcheese Makes Love Not War," a hilarious parody of Sontag by Marvin Mudrick, who pointed out that Sontag was...

...a critic whose every half-baked idea is a reject or thrift-shop markdown from the pastry cooks of post-World War II French intellectualism. . . . [W]hat matters [to her] isn't truth or sincerity or consistency or reality; what matters is 'style' or getting away with it.

Kimball continues:

Mudrick is especially good on Sontag's use of the word 'exemplary': 'Barthes's ideas have an exemplary coherence'; 'Some lives are exemplary, others not'; Rimbaud and Duchamp made 'exemplary renunciations' in giving up art for, respectively, gun-running and chess; 'Silence exists as a decision--in the exemplary suicide of the artist . . .'; etc. Dilating on Sontag's effusions about silence-'the silence of eternity prepares for a thought beyond thought, which must appear from the perspective of traditional thinking . . . as no thought at all'--Mudrick usefully points out the similarity between Sontag and that other sage of silence, Kahlil Gibran: 'Has silence or talk about it,' Mudrick asks, 'ever anywhere else been so very . . . exemplary?'

What Osama Fears

December 29, 2004 | 5:35 p.m.

The increase in vicious attacks by "insurgents" in Iraq shows that they know something American intellectuals don't know: Successful elections could mean the beginning of the end for them. As

Ralph Peters

notes:

Monday's message from Osama bin Laden told us what he fears: a vote.

Condemning any Iraqi who goes to the polls as an infidel, the terror master hopes to derail the elections. He knows that every ballot cast is a defeat.

Anyone who dismisses the importance of the upcoming Iraqi elections need only listen to Monsieur bin Laden's urgent plea for a boycott. Osama praised the atrocities of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a hands-on executioner, and welcomed his collaboration in efforts to block the balloting.

Islamic terrorists distrust the common people. They dread the strength of those who might think for themselves. Convinced that men and women must be governed fiercely from above, the terrorists are the gory religious incarnation of thousands of years of tyranny. Their god is a savage dictator in the clouds.

But Is It Kosher?
December 29, 2004 | 5:35 p.m.

Activists from PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) have gone undercover in a kosher slaughtering house. The ensuing video has given several rabbis

second thoughts

about one establishment called Agriprocessors:

After watching the video, which PETA posted online, some rabbis have concluded that the animals at Agriprocessors suffer unnecessarily--and have declared the meat unfit.

'The animals appear to be in agony,' Rabbi Joel Rembaum recently wrote his congregation at Temple Beth Am in Los Angeles. 'The meat that comes from there is not kosher.'

He was shocked, he wrote, by the sight of animals with gashed necks thrashing on a bloody floor for a minute or longer. He also rejected as unacceptably cruel the equipment the plant uses: a revolving metal drum that turns the cattle upside down, baring their necks for the cut, and then dumps them out seconds later on the concrete.

An Age-Old Question

December 28, 2004 | 2:55 p.m.

Stuck in airports yesterday, I marveled at the inadequacy of televised reports on the devastation in Asia. One asked: How is the Bush administration responding? Even a few print pieces on how tectonic plates work seemed insufficient in the face of such suffering and horror. It is difficult to fit such a primeval event into the normal format for "the story."

"All of this takes our mind away from today's comforts and technologies and gives us a glimpse of the world as it was centuries, if not millennia, ago,"

writes Carlo Stagnaro

, who works for a Turin-based free market think tank. "Namely, hostile: every single moment of the human adventure on Earth is part of a struggle between man and (mother) nature. Every step forward in our history has moved us toward a more humanized world: cold has been defeated by fire; difficulty to travel has been overcome by the wheel; food scarcity has been tackled by agriculture; the need for energy mitigated by the harnessing of fuel."

Stagnaro does have an agenda, but, since his remarks are original and worthy of debate, here is another nugget:

"Whatever the Gaia worshippers believe, nature is not a man's friend. By their stewardship over the environment, humans make it ordered and beautiful; natural forces can be a wellspring of life; but if they are not harnessed or controlled, they can bring about destruction and ugliness -- as they did in half a dozen countries on Monday. ...

"The countries that were struck by the tsunami are looking for a future, that may come only thanks to the free market. Foreign aid may help, but that's not the key. The key is the creation of wealth in order to make those places even more pleasant than how they used to be before the tragedy. Everything has to be reconstructed, brick after brick -- no matter if bricks and cement are politically incorrect."

William Rees-Mogg also saw mankind being humbled by awesome power of nature, but

he noted a certain terrible irony

: "If a million people have had their homes damaged or destroyed in Sri Lanka, there will be another million on the coast of India and more again in Thailand and Indonesia, perhaps in the Maldives as well. They will get some aid, but nothing like enough to make good their probable losses. The proud have had a lesson, but at the expense of the humble people of the earth. Nature can be a brutal moralist."

Amy Welborn noticed this intellectual

challenge to Christians posed by the tsunamis

--it comes from

Rob Vischer

on a website devoted to the development of Catholic legal theory:

"It seems to me that if we want a moral anthropology rooted in the Incarnation to be taken seriously, we must try to offer an explanation of a world in which tsunamis rip children from their mothers' arms. This is an age-old question, but it must lie at the heart of any effort to engage a culture made skeptical of our 'Catholic legal theory' project, at least in part, by pervasive human suffering seemingly caused by the God we embrace."

A False Rap for Israel?

December 28, 2004 | 2:55 p.m.

Catholic World News is reporting

that L'Osservatore Romano, the Vatican's official newspaper, is criticizing the Israeli Army's response to the disaster:

"Calling for 'a radical and dramatic change of perspective' among people 'too often preoccupied with making war, L'Osservatore Romano singled out Israeli military leaders for declining a request for emergency medical help. The Vatican paper observed that in what "should be a time for unconditional solidarity," some world leaders seem incapable of escaping a 'small-minded approach that restricts their horizons.'"

But the Israeli's may be getting a bum rap from the Vatican.

Extreme Catholic, a blogger, contends

(on Catholic World News):

"I just did a Google News Search of 'Sri Lanka Israel' and every news source from the BBC, to Indian, to American, all these news sources report that, on the contrary, Sri Lanka rejected the Israeli offer of aid because of its military composition. No news source other than LOR reports a denial by Israel of a request for assistance. According to the BBC: "Instead, a smaller team will escort a convoy carrying emergency supplies, Israeli officials said."

Since When Was Closing a Theater Free Speech?

December 28, 2004 | 2:55 p.m.

Novelist Salman Rushdie, who knows a thing or two about the West's tradition of free speech, is

outraged that violent protests by Sikhs

closed down a repertory theater production in Birmingham, England:

"Mr. Rushdie, 57, speaking at his London home, said: 'It has been horrifying to see the response. It is pretty terrible to hear government ministers expressing approval of the ban and failing to condemn the violence, when they should be supporting freedom of expression.' "His outburst was sparked by the refusal of Fiona Mactaggart, the home office minister, to offer support for either the theatre or the author following protests by a violent mob last weekend. Sikh groups organised the demonstrations because part of the play, which involves scenes of rape and murder, takes place in a temple, or gudwara.

"'The minister is sending entirely the wrong message,' Mr Rushdie said. 'It should be quite clear that, in this country, it is the liberty of any artist to express their view of their own society and their own community. Frankly, bookshops and theatres are full of things that would upset an interest group."

But of course the West is so afraid of the East and so lacking in confidence of its own traditions that it is not surprising that Mactaggart caved. As the target of a death threat by Iranian clerics, enraged by his portrayal of Islam in the novel "

The Satanic Verses

," Rushdie probably appreciates Western values a heck of a lot more than Mactaggart does.

The Hookies

December 28, 2004 | 2:55 p.m.

New York Times columnist

David Brooks is doling out Hookies

--named after public intellectual Sidney Hook--for the best essays of the year. Not surprisingly, several Hookies dealt with the contemporary conflict between East and West.

Here's one Hookie winner:

"

When Islam Breaks Down

, by Theodore Dalrymple. City Journal. A British prison doctor analyzes radical Islam. A typical passage: 'Their problem, and ours, is that they want the power that free inquiry confers, without either the free inquiry or the philosophy and institutions that guarantee that free inquiry. They are faced with a dilemma: either they can abandon their cherished religion, or they can remain forever in the rear of human technical advance. Neither alternative is very appealing; and the tension between their desire for power and success in the modern world on the one hand, and their desire not to abandon their religion on the other, is resolvable for some only by exploding themselves as bombs."

The Reason for the Season

December 23, 2004 | 2:50 p.m.

"And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus, that all the world should be taxed. (And this taxing was first made when Cyrenius was governor of Syria.) And all went to be taxed, every one into his own city. And Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth, into Judaea, unto the city of David, which is called Bethlehem; (because he was of the house and lineage of David) to be taxed with Mary his espoused wife, being great with child. And so it was, that, while they were there, the days were accomplished that she should be delivered. And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn. And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid. And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, be hold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord. And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger. And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying, Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men."

--The

gospel according to Luke

, beginning at the second chapter...

"Training for Eternity"

December 23, 2004 | 2:50 p.m.

It's so hard to remember what really matters when the going gets rough. There could be fewer places where it gets rougher than in Iraq. "

Training for Eternity

" is the blog of a chaplain at Mosul who somehow manages to remember what is important in the in the most desperate of circumstances.

Instapundit

and

Belmont Club

have both quoted from the chaplain. Here's what Insta cited:

The enemy chose the weakest point he could find to attack; exploited the known limitations of the American response; and understood that he was to all intents and purposes exempted from the condemnation attendant to attacking the wounded and medical personnel. The chaplain and the medical personnel knew this and did not mill around expecting the Geneva Convention to protect them from those who have never heard of it, except as it applies to their own convenience. ...

But the enemy ability to exploit the limits of American response and attack medical personnel with public relations impunity are examples of military advantages that arise from political restraints. To the extent the blogosphere can dispel the propaganda cover willingly provided by the Left, people on the home front can help the soldiers in the field. It is necessary to link the war criminal behavior of the enemy with the studied blindness of 'sophisticates' towards their most heinous crimes. They are twinned; with the former made possible by the latter. The Daily Telegraph describes how some European agencies actually refuse to look at mass grave sites to avoid being party to the punishment of war criminals."

This is what made me read the chaplain's blog--and it's a great and relevant observation. But I hope you'll go into the blog and read about the chaplain's ministering to the wounded and dying. This part doesn't lend itself to snippet quotes.

A Too Hot Tip for the AP?

December 23, 2004 | 2:50 p.m.

"Conservative bloggers tar an AP photojournalist with complicity in Sunday's street execution in Baghdad--another cheap shot at the 'left-wing' media,"

opines Salon

.

Belmont Club

(which is terrific on what's going on in Iraq) responds:

"The photo itself raises more questions than any conservative blogger ever could. It shows traffic backed up behind the killers, afraid to proceed further. The attack, according to the

Associated Press's own account

was carried out by "about 30 armed insurgents, hurling hand grenades and firing guns", but the photograph itself is taken from a fairly elevated position, as from a standing person."

"It was the surely the most amazing of coincidences that placed an Associated Press photographer in a position to openly photograph an execution, where we are reliably informed, no less than 30 armed men were firing guns and hurling hand grenades. ..."

(Salon includes a picture of the photo in question.)

Religion without Rules

December 23, 2004 | 2:50 p.m.

Loose Canon has never understood religion that one makes up oneself. This

piece on pagans

in a London weekly is very confusing to her:

"So, can a modern pagan just pick any god to worship? I asked. Egyptian? Roman? African? Are there any rules? Steve put his hands self-consciously under the table, 'No rules,' he said. 'Being a pagan is about being free from institutional rules. And the gods? Once you start seeking they choose you, really. Everyone has their own path, but we all celebrate the same festivals: the summer and winter solstices, spring and autumn equinoxes and four other festivals: Samhain, Imbolc, Beltane and Lughnasad.'"

Were Mary and Joseph in a Relationship?

December 23, 2004 | 2:50 p.m.

That's the

headline of a piece by Peter Toon

. Seems they weren't:

"One thing about a modern 'relationship' is that it is freely entered into and it can be freely dissolved by one party alone or by joint agreement of all parties involved. Thus "relationship" is a word that particularly fits well into modern western culture where individual rights and freedom are so much prized and people are on the move.

"So were Mary and Joseph in a 'relationship'? No! No! and No!...We first hear of them as being betrothed..."

The Rev. Toon is author of "

The End of Liberal Theology: Contemporary Challenges to Evangelical Orthodoxy

."

Were Lucrezia and Alexander in a Relationship?

December 23, 2004 | 2:50 p.m.

Lucrezia Borgia, of course, was in lots of relationships. Her most notorious was with her papa, Pope Alexander. But now Sarah Bradford, the celebrated English biographer, is claiming in a new book, "

Lucrezia Borgia, Life, Love and Death in Renaissance Italy

", that history's most notorious loose woman did not, in fact, have an affair with not so dear old dad.

According to Bradford, it was all a nasty canard started by Giovanni Sforza, to whom the pope married Lucrezia and then quickly dissolved the union when it was no longer helpful to the papal pop.

From a

review

by Andrea Hoag:

"[Alexander's] reason for the church-sanctioned split? He claimed Lucrezia's husband was impotent. Eager to defend his sexual prowess, the spurned Sforza was the man responsible for starting the Borgia incest rumors; he insisted that the real motive behind the divorce was the lusty pontiff's desire to keep Lucrezia all to himself.

"Bradford is quick to point out that there's little concrete evidence to support this claim, but still, the biographer proves she can dish with the best of them when necessary. Even as she's denying some of the more salacious rumors clinging to Lucrezia's legend, she faithfully includes the deliciously slanderous bits she stumbled across in her research. ..."

A Christmas Memory

December 23, 2004 | 2:50 p.m.

Christmas is one of those times when we see all around us people who'll have a hard time that day.

Peggy Noonan recalled

a happy Christmas memory:

"Is there a moral to this memory? What it taught me, what I remember all these years later, is that everyone likes gifts but no one is more affected by their power than children. They are susceptible to wonder. A child can look at a red toy car in the red-green glow of Christmas tree lights and imagine an entire lifetime. A child can play with a new doll and smell good things being cooked and hear sweet music and it can make that child imagine that life is good, which gives her a template for good, a category for good; it helps her know good exists. This knowledge comes in handy in life; those who do not receive it, one way or another, are sadder than those who do...."

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