IVIV BIG DISCUSSION [spoiler] Compare & Contrast section, P. 32

[Michael Bailey]

John Bailey wrote:
> The lines preceding Otto's quote below: "Doc knew these people, he'd
> seen enough of them in the course of business. They went out to
> collect cash debts, they broke ribcages, they got people fired, they
> kept an unforgiving eye on anything that might become a threat."
>
> Doc sure knows those people. He used to do one of those things, and
> wasn't far off some of the others.
>

well, I reluctantly accede to that.
If grace in Lew Basknight's sense is seeing things as they are,
then it would be wrong to bless the collections profession too strenuously.
I guess...

In _Against the Day_, Lew breaks out of the oppressor mode (just as
Dashiell Hammett left the Pinkertons in real life) --
so, does Doc?

if we admit that skip tracer isn't in fact an admirable
thing to be, can we still believe that while he was doing it, he had
to have thought
that it was at least justifiable?

and the fact that he moves laterally rather than rising in that
profession (although from a "towards goodness" view his move is upward),
does that help us to a more secure sense of his worthiness
as a protagonist?

not entirely from my point of view as an extremist pacifist,
perhaps - all those hours in the shooting gallery could've been
better spent reading Gandhi or volunteering for Food not Bombs,
or doing Yoga and chanting OM...

nor from a Marxist point of view - he'd have had to be going to
party meetings or something, wouldn't he?

but for a person with his sensibilities...and, sure, those are open
to inspection and debate and dispute...what he does makes pretty good sense,
emotionally, at least to my (stannous) ear