Donald Duck and charitable utility

Uncle Scrooge and charitable utility, originally uploaded by trexfiles23.

One fascinating aspect of junk media is the way they refract social values. Take, for instance, Carl Barks' Donald Duck comics, which transformed the gag cartoon into an epic exploration of the moral complexity of American culture. Drugs, exploitation, radioactive hair-treatment scams (!)--Barks had the freedom to hold his magic mirror to our world precisely because no one took his artistic medium seriously.

Following up on yesterday's image from A Christmas in Shacktown, here are a few panels from what happens after Uncle Scrooge answers the door. When Uncle Scrooge sees that his visitor is his nephew Donald Duck, he decides not to fire his anti-philanthropy cannon.  But much to Scrooge's dismay, Donald is indeed seeking a donation for a charitable cause--the children of impoverished Shacktown.  The request:  $50--$25 for a turkey dinner, and $25 for a toy train, the first and only Christmas present the children in Shacktown would ever receive.   

Moving beyond outright resistance to the very notion of giving, Uncle Scrooge zeroes in what he sees as the gift's fatal flaw:

No utility.

Feeding the poor--that he can agree with;it has an identifiable return on investment. Giving children a toy train, however, is "useless." If the women--and in a previous panel Uncle Scrooge launches into the irrationality of charity as a woman's domain, one that taints the males foolish enough to indulge it--are going to insist on such nonsense, they are going to have to earn that money first before he gives his more practical gift.

Note that what Scrooge promotes--utility, matching funds, and as the rest of the story elaborates, earned income for charity--are precisely what we tend to value today. Yet Barks sees them as antithetical to charity. Even in the purest sense of poverty relief, Barks conveys, the inutile plays an essential role in making life truly human.

One might be tempted to say this sequence is a relic of an obsolete tradition, irrelevant to today. And that would be wrong. Barks was a designer and a storyteller, an artist skilled in the timeless rhetoric of composition. The utter hopelessness of Shacktown--not even enough money to play--stood in stark contrast to the absolute wealth of Uncle Scrooge, whose every business venture yielded ample returns.

As the past decade's market boom subsides, the social enterprise movement is going to face more cultural resistance. Bringing the logic of rational capitalism to areas seemingly overwhelmed by systemic market failure is not going to make sense. It's also going to seem cruel, or at the very least inhumane. How we adapt to this is going to determine whether social enterprise itself will be sustainable.

NEXT in Charity and Comics: The tipping point and toy trains