It should have been repulsive, this giant self-administered orgasm of righteousness branded Live 8. One should have been appalled that the masses were urged to action by Madonna, the hatchet-faced poster-girl of everything that has been repulsive in the West for the past two decades; who, despite her heavily publicised modesty, still hasn’t thought it necessary to change her name and, therefore, still signs things as the Mother of God.
Likewise, it should have been infuriating to see plump, educated twentysomethings with good teeth and expensive sneakers storming what were very polite barricades outside the G8 summit in Glen-eagles; their absenteeism budgeted for and allowed by the same economic system they were trying to overthrow. Nothing like damning Western capitalism when you’re fetching your welfare cheque and heading pubwards.
But none of it was disgusting; not the expressions of pre-Colombian simplicity and joy on the faces of the singers as they unwittingly united to make Bob Geldof feel better about the fact that he has a hit every 20 years, will be dead in 30, and forgotten in 40; not the undergraduate unexamined self-loathing at the police line. Because one really didn’t expect anything else.
“We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality”, observed Thomas Babington Macaulay halfway through the 19th century — frankly rendering all further comment about this week’s ambidextrous events (masturbation with one hand, self-flagellation with the other) redundant.
Which is why this columnist will say no more about any of it, except to hope that rising sea levels and “military assimilation for cultural integration” by the Chinese spares us from the inevitable Geldof events that lie ahead: LiveAte in 2025, protesting the practice of raising gargantuan pasty white pigs and chickens in the low gravity of moon-farms; 2045’s LiveAids, a reaction to the discovery that HIV/Aids is spread by sex rather than poverty and is currently wiping out the teenage and prepubescent populations of Britain and the United States; and finally LiveAid in 2065, a desperate plea to the wealthy countries of Africa and Asia to send food and money to the flyblown war-ravaged wastes of Western Europe.
No, there are more pressing concerns for the observer who doesn’t quite trust Mariah Carey to be the voice of global salvation. Like the looming energy crisis, for example, put firmly on the table by United States President George W Bush this week as he explained that the US has to put American interests first.
It makes sense, really. To a fundamentalist Christian president, serving a fundamentalist electorate, the fossil fuel situation is quite clear: the meek shall inherit the Earth, but in the meantime they won’t mind if the brash use up all the oil first before they leave to farm mega-chickens in the Sea of Tranquility. I mean, it doesn’t say: “The meek shall inherit the Earth plus all the oil and the forests and the beasts of the field and the birds of the air.” No, the meek are getting a ball of rock, and they should be grateful, Goddamn pussy Democrat shrinking violets that they are.
Rationing is not a concept that finds much purchase in current US theology with its talk of the End Times, the great Apocalypse that’s been imminent for 2 000 years, a day of Rapture on which all heterosexual Republicans — and Tom Cruise — will be taken to sit at the right hand of the Daddy Mac. And the best part is you don’t have to feel bad for the meek, because that’s what they do: they get left behind. They’re the suckers who offer you their place on the life raft. It’s in their nature. Hallelujah.
But there is hope. Last Friday, SAfm hosted a phone-in show about the escalating petrol price. One listener, her synapses crackling, phoned in breathlessly to ask, “Has anyone ever considered the idea of developing an alternative to petrol?” With a single stroke of brilliance, she had answered her own questioned, and saved the meek.
Because if we are to survive, we must invite people like that lady to the table. Her, and everyone at Live 8 and Gleneagles. And then we need to bulldoze them into peat bogs, and leave them there for five million years to turn into high-quality oil.