"A Christmas for Shacktown"

If you're going to attempt some sort of Marxist hermeneutics of Uncle Scrooge--AND YOU ARE! DON'T TRY TO DENY IT!--"A Christmas for Shacktown" is going to have to be pretty well at the center of your analysis. How is it that Scrooge can mostly be a more-or-less sympathetic character? Only because his massive wealth is, in point of fact, divorced from any real-world socioeconomic significance. He might as well be an especially avid stamp collector. This is the way it has to be, because if he were, let's say, surrounded by children dying of easily treatable diseases that he REFUSED to help because MONEY MONEY MONEY MINE MINE MINE, he would just be a monster. Even a modern-day Flintheart Glomgold (who is South African, dontcha know) would be unable to recognize the AIDS epidemic because, as villainous as he is (I should have a LOT more to say about ol' Flinty at a later date, incidentally), there's no way he could be portrayed as being THAT evil.

By no means am I saying this is a flaw--I love Scrooge and company, and even if I AM being radicalized by all this subversive postmodern, Marxist theory I'm reading, I ain't gonna stop. It's just how it is. If anything, it seems to me that you could read Scrooge's example as a critique of prevailing economic systems--ie, the only way this kind of laissez faire, transnational capitalism can function in an ethical manner is in a fantasy world. You certainly don't HAVE to see it that way. But you COULD.

Be that as it may, "Christmas for Shacktown" is striking in large part because it comes face-to-face with this issue, resulting in an odd kind of dissonance. I'm not sure whether it's a bug or a feature; whether Barks actually consciously saw what he was doing--but it certainly clarifies the above-mentioned issues.

Mind you, that's not the ONLY thing worth noting about this story; it's one of Barks' best Christmas tales. The plot, in brief: there is Shacktown, viz:



Grinding, Dickensian poverty is not something you see every day in Barks stories--in fact, I'm not sure you see it ANY day but this one. Everyone--Donald, Daisy, HDL--wants to help the Shacktowners have a merry Christmas. They need fifty dollars--fifty lousy dollars!--to buy a turkey and a train set. Everyone's very compassionate and helpful (it IS a Christmas story, right?), but not in an overly saccharine way. Even the normally intolerable Gladstone helps out. But Scrooge? Well, that's another story, and that's the crux of it. He VERY grudgingly agrees to pay half of the needed sum of money, but only once the more socially engaged members of the family manage to scrape together the rest of it. Hijinks ensue, the money is earned, Merry Christmas!

Obviously, the story wouldn't work if Scrooge just GAVE them the money without a struggle, but there's something more than a little bit grotesque about this:



...when juxtaposed with THIS:



CRIPPLED CHILDREN, FOR GOD'S SAKE! Scrooge could EASILY drag the entirety of Shacktown above the poverty line without suffering any perceptible monetary loss--but it's damn near impossible to pry a tiny amount of cash away from him to momentarily alleviate their suffering. And if you think he experiences an Ebenezer Scrooge-like change of heart at the end, you have another think coming. He more or less accidentally ends up giving way more money than he'd meant to, but he suffers all the way through, and The Spirit of Christmas™ never touches his blackened heart. It's interesting stuff. You wouldn't want it to be anything other than the exception that proves the rule, however, the "rule" being that, for all his avarice, he'll do the right thing when it comes down to it, regardless of the cost (see, eg, "A Cold Bargain," "Back to the Klondike," "Pipeline to Danger").

A right-wing type--the kind who doesn't mind looking like an asshole in the name of principle (the principle being: "I'm a dickhead!") would object: "He EARNED that money! Why should he have to give any of it away? Theft! Coercion! Communism!"). I really don't feel that there's any need to engage with such a morally bankrupt attitude, but I'm enough of a socialist that I'll just go ahead and say, no, he bloody well SHOULDN'T get to keep it all! Human beings are more important than money! If there were a hell, Ayn Rand would be rotting in it right now! Fortunately, this isn't really an issue, since he generally doesn't live in a world in which he's surrounded by human suffering on a massive scale. And as long as this is the case, we can root for him and enjoy watching him swimming in massive seas of cash. Let's just remember to separate fantasy from reality, all right?

(Objectivist Duck comics--there's a horrific thought for you.)