Action stations: Mark Steyn says that if you really want to be charitable, you should send your cheque to the Pentagon or the Royal Australian Navy.

Publication: Spectator

Publication Date: 25-JUN-05

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COPYRIGHT 2005 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)

New Hampshire

There's a moment in the new Batman (reviewed elsewhere in these pages) that made my ears prick up almost as much as those on top of the dark knight's cute little Bat-mask. Bruce Wayne has just bumped into his childhood sweetheart Rachel Dawes in the lobby of some Gotham City hotel. Unfortunately, he's sopping wet, having been cavorting in the ornamental fountain with a couple of hot pieces of arm candy. Rachel is a crusading district attorney and Bruce can see she's a bit disappointed to discover her old pal is now Paris Hilton in drag. So he attempts to assure her that deep down he still cares about all the worthy stuff. Rachel swats this aside. It's not what you feel inside that counts, she says. 'It's what you do that defines you.'

Bruce wanes, visibly, under her withering riposte. I wouldn't claim this film has anything as coherent as a philosophy, but they thought enough of that line to reprise it late in the action. 'It's what you do that defines you,' Batman whispers to Rachel before diving off a rooftop to go whump the bad guys. 'Bruce ... ?' she says, faintly.

A couple of days later I read that Oxfam had paid the best part of a million bucks to Sri Lankan customs officials for the privilege of having 25 four-wheel-drive vehicles allowed into the country to get aid out to remote villages on washed-out roads hit by the Boxing Day tsunami. The Indian-made Mahindras stood idle on the dock in Colombo for a month as Oxfam's representatives were buried under a tsunami of paperwork. Aside from the 'tax', they were charged 2,750 [pounds sterling] 'demurrage' for every day the vehicles sat in port.

This was merely the latest instalment in what's becoming a vast ongoing Tsunami Tshakedown Of The Day retrospective--you can usually find it at the foot of page 37 in your daily paper, if at all. Fourteen Unicef ambulances...

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