Tried to watch the pathetic coverage of mindless sheep watching mega-millionaire rock stars encouraging them to vote away their own wealth to fund African despots, but MTV seemed more interested in having their VJs yapping at each other and showing interviews with geo-economic and political luminaries like Dave Matthews and Natalie Portman.
Even Sting seemed irony-deficient as he sang a modified version of “Every Breath You Take” – threatening the G8 leaders that “we’ll be watching you” obviously thinking of his villa in Tuscany he could be conducting said surveilance from. Ahem…
In case you were wondering why ANOTHER concert was necessary when we’d clearly solved world hunger with the original Live Aid show 20 years ago (didn’t we?), a hint can be found in
“Slaking a thirst with a fire hose” by Wesley Pruden:
This must be Tuesday, because poverty in Africa ended Monday.
All it took were a few chords, a lot of screaming, several acres of dirty hair and a cloud cover of lethal body odor. When the last guitar strings snapped Saturday night at those Live 8 concerts across the world, promoter Bob Geldof’s over-the-hill gang had the prescription: just stuff a few billion dollars down the bottomless holes on the Dark Continent.
“This is the greatest rock show in the history of the world,” cried the announcer at the London concert. Gushed a disc jockey on XM Satellite Radio: “This is the single most important concert ever.”
No one wanted to stop there. Shouted one of the “musicians” of a group called Coldplay: “This is the greatest thing that’s ever been in the entire history of the world.”
As if we didn’t need another reason to think Coldplay sucks.
Since “the entire history of the world” includes the extinction of the dinosaurs, the eruption of Krakatoa, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the construction of the pyramids, the Resurrection of Christ and man’s landing on the moon, Live 8 had to be impressive mush.
But this week the grown-ups take over, as grown-ups always must, when the G-8 economic summit commences in Scotland under the baton of Tony Blair, who not only wants to eliminate African poverty but to end global warming before Christmas.
The nations of the West must do something to ease the brutal pain of generations of unbridled greed, ignorant incompetence and rabid corruption in Africa. It’s our Christian duty. But it will require discipline that is out of fashion in the 21st century, and it certainly isn’t what the simple-minded noisemakers of Live 8 had in mind.
The example of Nigeria says it all. Figures released last month by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, as reported in the London Daily Telegraph, reveal that in the 45 years since Britain granted independence in 1960 a succession of despots squandered $387 billion (that’s a “b,” not an “m”), almost to the dollar the sum of all Western aid to all of Africa between 1960 and 1997. One of the despots, Gen. Sani Abacha, now safely dead, is believed to have looted Nigeria’s vast oil reserves of more than $5 billion in just five years.
Tony Blair’s No. 2 man, George Brown, talks giddily of a Marshall Plan for Africa, but Nigerian despots alone have already pocketed the equivalent of six Marshall Plans. George C. Marshall’s miracle scheme for rebuilding Europe worked because mature European leadership was determined to rescue the continent from the ravages of World War II. There’s scant evidence that Africa’s “leaders” want anything more than to drink from the fire hose.
Live 8 concerts are nice, and the photographs of starving children will break the coldest heart, but unless Europe and the West accompany aid with the kind of supervision nobody has the courage to impose, the aid will wind up in the usual Swiss banks, and 20 years from now another generation of children will die while naive hearts bleed.
It’s not cruel and inhuman to want to prevent aid from going to tyrants – it’s cruel to attack those who want to provide REAL aid, not just have a self-congratulatory concert so that we can all pat ourselves on the back and tell each other how noble we are because “we care.”
5 worked it out »