For shame. Have you no compassion, you sniping cynics? Where is your decency, you huddled neoconservatives? Honestly. What chance did poor Bob Geldof and his co-pensioners stand against your spleen? Did you not feel a single tinge of remorse as you condemned his Live 8 concert as nothing more than a desperate attempt to revive his own moribund career? Didn’t you pause before reflecting that his bread-and-butter is provided by the starving masses of Africa?
I am appalled. Did your mothers never tell you how cruel it is to mock, even if one is mocking the pathologically vain and the monumentally hypocritical? You have been ugly, sirs, and I think Mr Geldof deserves an apology. Of course, you’ll have to wait until he gets his head out of his bum so that he can hear you, but then I expect genuine contrition.
Frankly, most of the nastiness levelled at Geldof is unwarranted. Just because nobody knows the name of his regular band, it doesn’t mean he’s a terrible person. A terrible musician, yes, but not a bad bloke. And just because his 1985 schmaltz-hit Do They Know it’s Christmas? was a steaming pile of self-congratulating dung, it doesn’t follow that the question wasn’t worth asking.
Indeed, did the children know it was Christmas? And if they didn’t, was Geldof vindicated in asking? Sure, Bob thought they didn’t know it was Christmas because the West hadn’t sent them enough cuddles and Advent calendars, and not because they were Muslim or Animist or Buddhist and too far gone to know where they were or whether it was day or night, but now we’re splitting hairs. Potato, patahto.
But it could be argued, fairly successfully, that Geldof and Live 8 weren’t solely responsible for this week’s cancellation of more than $40-billion in debt. That victory went to the human spirit.
The human spirit — currently celebrating its triumph in a hot-tub with some chewing tobacco, a Willie Nelson album and three strippers — is apparently something like The Force from the Star Wars films. Not everyone can see it. In fact, it only manifests itself to Peter Gabriel, Oprah and former beauty queens hustling a buck on late-night talk shows, but they seem to see a shimmering sheen around the downtrodden and the oppressed, and it chokes them up a treat.
For those of us not similarly clairvoyant, the human spirit smells like a licence to print money. Not that I’m knocking the Make Poverty History campaign. On the contrary: one hopes its eventual success will lead to knock-on movements such as Make Paris Hilton History. But one can’t help suspecting that those whiter than white wristbands are a product hawked by a new industry. And where there’s an industry, there are comfortable salaries for middle-class people.
Or massive salaries for wealthy people. Obviously, good and dedicated people such as Rudd Lubbers, the current United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, have to eat. And on R2 ,1-million a year, you can eat a whole lot. Mr Lubbers has a highly developed social conscience, and repays almost his entire salary to the UNHCR, but when the books are balanced, that’s still R2 ,1-million that’s gone exactly nowhere.
But perhaps my unease with Geldof and Tinkerbell and Jiminy Cricket and all the other public figures who step out of private jets to read their anti-poverty statements is based on the creeping suspicion that they don’t have the faintest idea what they’re talking about.
Yes, they’ve been to Africa, and they’ve seen poverty, stepped in it, and scraped it off their Nikes. But have they understood it? How can they, when the European Union defines poverty as living on 60% of the average income of one’s country? What kind of coked-up hyper–bourgeois Eurotrash thinks that earning R16 000 a month — 60% of the average income in Liechtenstein — has anything in common with being poverty-stricken? Do Swiss who earn R10 200 a month loll hopelessly in tent camps, rationing their Riesling and Camembert, as they ponder the hell of living below Switzerland’s EU-defined poverty line?
These people really need to get out more.