by Rex Murphy
U2 is, of course, Bono’s band, Bono, the greatest scold of rich governments on the face of the earth. Bono was the man who nagged Paul Martin in public for Canada’s not giving enough for African debt relief, but then, Bono—friend of Bill Clinton, consort of the princes of the world, World Economic Forum attendee, gazillionaire—nags everyone about Africa. He even read the riot act of liberal outrage to his own government because the Irish government, like Canada, was slack on debt relief for Africa. Uriah Heap with groupies.
Bono and his multimillionaire bandmates have hauled their songwriting business out of Ireland because Ireland has modestly upped the tax levy on artists making over half a million a year. So he wants Ireland to give more of its taxes to help poor Africa, but he, Bono, wants to pay less in taxes to Ireland. I’d call him a whited sepulchre, except that’s a biblical reference, and Madonna would probably claim copyright.
Bono did not hesitate, at a concert here last year around election time, to tag Paul Martin, his friend, for not living up to his pledge to increase Canada’s foreign aid. Bono said he was crushed. Well, I guess the “Make Poverty History” front-man has less trouble with inconsistency and hypocrisy when it’s his bank account and those of his bandmates that actually take the hit. Yet Bono’s been shining his rock-star celebrity halo so assiduously in public that you’d think he was a cross between Mother Theresa and Cardinal Léger.
This guy has been lecturing whole continents for decades—he’s the self-declared pope of poverty—about Africa, but now hauls part of his empire from his home country to Amsterdam. Lecture us no more, Mr. Bono. A tax haven is not a pulpit. Amsterdam is not an African village. However, all is not lost. Maybe Bono will adopt someone. Let us pray—let us all pray—it’s Madonna. They deserve each other.
EGO WARRIORS | July 14, 2007
The reviews are in concerning last weekend’s ecosanctimony staged by global warming’s Nostradamus, Al Gore, and most of them aren’t pretty. It was, according to the advance hype—and the hype for this event matched anything Hollywood revs up for Johnny Depp in a bandana or a new Jessica Simpson big-screen onslaught—going to command an audience in excess of two billion.
There is nothing original in rounding up a beaker full of rock stars and movie celebrities, faded songsters and a rapper or two to variously strum, gyrate and posture for a cause du jour. We have had “We Are the World” and Live Aid, Willie Nelson doing his minstrel bit for the American farmer, and last year’s care-a-palooza, the Make Poverty History jamboree, which didn’t.
NBC devoted three hours of prime time to last Saturday’s effort, which trawled a measly 2.7 million viewers, a number that would be embarrassing for a home-cooking show or a rerun of Three’s Company. Not even such A-list, world-dominating entertainers as Madonna and Shakira, assisted by those cleavage climatologists the Pussycat Dolls, could lure the torpid and the unaware, in any numbers, to the home screen. Nor could Snoop Dogg (the bard of “Nuthin’ but a ‘G’ Thang”), appearing on stage in Hamburg (Hamburg? Who knew?) jolt the singalong into a zone of even mild, credible buzz.
What happened?
I suppose the spectacle of the world’s most wasteful people, rock-star plutocrats with their cribs and bling, caravans of trailer trucks and 100,000-watt amplifiers, taking a day out of their wealth-stuffed lives to preach to the less well off of the world on the moral importance of consuming less “to save the planet” set the hypocrisy bar so high that it put too great a strain on the digestion of ordinary people. In the wicked words of one rock star who declined to climb aboard the bandwagon, “Private jets for climate change.”
Unless outfitted with a cast-iron stomach—and I mean a real one—how could anybody endure Madonna of the Nine Mansions wrapping herself in the ascetics of the ecomovement? Hyper-indulgent, super-pampered, colossally wealthy, manically consumerist entertainment celebrities preaching restraint to others: Live Earth was a weird and monstrous journey to a whole new dimension of live irony. Come back, Uriah Heep. All is forgiven.
Not even the professional environmentalists could stay their gorge at Madonna’s participation. They gave the world the news that the Material Girl owns shares in the most politically incorrect enterprises, such as Alcoa, the American aluminum giant, the Ford Motor Company and Weyerhaeuser, which—gasp!—chops trees for money.
Then there was the sheer, deep folly of it all. What has Shakira, or her hips, got to offer on the question of the world’s weather over the next hundred years? But Shakira is Robert Oppenheimer on steroids compared with Geri Halliwell of the long-forgotten fluff band the Spice Girls—“Yo, I’ll tell you what I want, what I really, really want, etc., etc., etc., etc.”
Geri Halliwell, Snoop Dogg, Shakira, Madonna and the Pussycat arborists are an unlikely think tank (maybe a think tank top?) on global warming or anything else. They are career publicists of themselves, artists in the merchandising of fluff and ego.
But beyond the obvious hypocrisy, beyond the saccharine, Mickey Rooneyesque “let’s put on a show” conceit of the Live Earth dud-spectacular, I think something rather deeper and, perhaps grimly encouraging, accounts for its failure.
The public has just gotten tired of “stars.” These luminescent bodies are now in much the same leaky boat as most politicians because, by trying to wed themselves to some aspects of politics to strengthen or underwrite their highly capitalist careers, they are seen as manipulative in precisely the same cynical way politicians are. Entertainers are, primarily, politicians of their own careers.
They don’t have the “cred” they used to have. They have been exposed as shills for themselves before anything else. And so it’s not the elephantine “carbon footprint” of Madonna or the big bands that turned people away from Live Earth. It’s the growing perception that all the strutting icons up there on all those stages are playing a game, just as the politicians play a game, and for very much the same self-serving, egoistic reasons.
It’s an Animal Farm moment for our time: “The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
Now it’s impossible to say which are the stars and which are the politicians. Madonna and Gore—can you spot the difference?
Al Gore is still talking, but I think his moment too—as politician who morphed into the less demanding though more remunerative role of celebrity—is either passing or passed. Al doesn’t generate the “vibe” anymore. Celebrity is rocket fuel—it is very high-octane stuff—but for all but the most skillful or lucky it’s only good for a short, fast rise. Al will still trot—or private jet—the world, and play John the Baptist for the coming global warming Armageddon. He’s still good for a walk-on at an awards show—Snoop Dogg presents, Lindsay Lohan is in the wings—and a headliner at some conference of the perpetually and professionally worrying class. The Nobel Prize was his apogee, and even that moment didn’t have the feel of real, class-A achievement. Is it because the Nobel itself is a decaying gold star? Or is it because there was something just a little too neat, maybe compensatory, about awarding the world’s bluest blue ribbon to the man who lost—dare we write the name—to the “witless” George W. Bush?
THERE’S SOMETHING ABOUT CASSANDRA | November 1, 2008
Where is Cameron Diaz? Haven’t seen—and, worse, haven’t heard from—her in so long a while. Has she been disappeared? Is she in Guantanamo, the Bush-Cheney gulag for dissident celebrities?
A little more than four years ago, on a panel boasting the finest minds the world has known since the days of ancient Athens, when Socrates was tutoring Plato, Ms. Diaz was offering advice on the coming election between George Bush and John Kerry.
The setting was the daily edification we all know and love as The Oprah Winfrey Show. The grand empath, her Oprahness, had designed a program to stir the youth of America to vote, and crowded onto the couch (besides Ms. Diaz) an almost frightening constellation of intelligence and prestige.
There was Sean Combs, a putty artist of nomenclature, whom you may know as Puff Daddy, P. Diddy, Puffy, Diddy, Daddy Piff or Diddy Puff. The backup intellects for the occasion, doo-woppers for Mr. Diddy’s famous Vote or Die campaign, were Christina Aguilera and Drew Barrymore.
Think of it as a symphony of mind.
It was the sylphlike Ms. Diaz who most lucidly framed the choice between George (Neanderthal, Halliburton, frat boy, Karl Rove puppet, tool of Big Oil, IQ of a lug wrench) Bush and John (elegant) Kerry. She issued a warning to the timid and vacant minds of young America, especially to the female half of that monstrous demographic: “If you think rape should be legal, then don’t vote!”
And lest that wouldn’t hold their attention—the young of America are notoriously detached—the delectable Cassandra who had transfixed the world in There’s Something About Mary further cautioned that they “could lose the right to their bodies.” Which would be inconvenient.
America didn’t listen that day—at least, young America didn’t. George (amoeba, cretin, theocrat, warmonger) Bush defeated John (sweet) Kerry, rape has been legal in that despoiled country for four years, and millions of young women have had to get government permission to use their bodies for anything—getting out of bed, going to a global warming protest, dropping by Starbucks or attending the MTV Awards (where a body is an absolute must—although there’s a cover charge on the brain).
We haven’t heard from Ms. Diaz this cycle, which is such a shame. Maybe she’s just tired. Or taken up macramé. Speaking Bluetooth to power can drain the old soul. But America is nothing if not the country of renewal. If one oracle vanishes, another leaps from the self-help rack at Barnes and Noble, or from the back pages of the better fashion magazines.
The Cameron Diaz of the 2008 election—and, need I say, supporter of Barack (cool, mesmeric, “thrill up my leg,” hope, change, new dawn, better dawn, dawn all day) Obama is Erica Jong. Ms. Jong wrote a book called Fear of Flying, which is to literature what Charlie’s Angels is to theology.
But Ms. Jong is, make no mistake about it, a seer and guru of Diaz-like dimensions. She hangs about with an almost equally illustrious crowd, numbering such geopolitical high foreheads as Jane (Hanoi, exercise videos, Ted Turner) Fonda and Naomi (Al Gore’s “earth tones” clothing consultant, author of The Treehouse) Wolf as among her fellow thinkers.
Ms. Jong, and God bless her courage, issued a warning this week—via the Italian press, where the Apocalypse (not surprisingly) has its own feature page—that should Barack Obama lose the election on Tuesday, “blood will run in the streets.” Fearful that that was a tad ambiguous, she—this was the novelist in her breaking out—referenced America’s founding trauma.
“If Obama loses, it will spark the second American Civil War.” There you have it. Vote for Barack Obama, or Gettysburg will have a sequel, and poor Ken Burns will have to do that damn series all over again. The stakes are high. You betcha. (And, oh yes, Jane Fonda’s having “back pains” just thinking about this. Which probably means she should stop thinking with her back, but I digress.)
Well, we all know what happened when America ignored Cameron Diaz four years ago. Global warming, Katrina, stock-market meltdown and, of course, that rape thing. The question is, will Americans similarly ignore the prescience of the artist who gave the world the concept of a “zipless fuck”?
I cannot think it will. America will not a second time be heedless. There will not be blood on the streets. No second Civil War. And America, and Barack Obama, will have no one to thank for it but Erica Jong, and the immortal slogan: Save Jane’s Back—Vote Obama. Intellect will out: John McCain and Sarah Palin are toast.
In my books, this is right up there with Cameron Diaz. Sigh.
Among the many blessings, uncounted till this very moment, of the election of Barack Obama to the American presidency, are the reduction in Jane Fonda’s “back pains” and the averting of the second American Civil War. I do not know which of this two history will choose to merit the superior wreath in Obama’s civil crown. For, insomuch as he has stayed a scene of civil slaughter—at least according to Erica Jong and the illuminati of The View—he must be regarded as a true American hero. But to have assuaged the ravages wrought by years of producing exercise videos (Jane Fonda was the spandex queen of losing weight by televised exhibition) in which she so aerobically starred, to have reduced Jane Fonda’s back pain, is an accomplishment from which Clio may stagger back in bewildered amazement. The goddess of History probably has no scale in which to enter achievement of this magnitude.
And good news for Cameron Diaz—Bush is gone and rape is, once more, illegal. Making statements of pathetic ignorance is, however, as legal as ever.
CARTOON CRISIS
UNDER THE COVER OF FAITH | February 11, 2006
The casual understanding of what is being called the cartoon crisis is fairly straightforward. A Danish newspaper published twelve cartoons that depicted the Prophet Mohammed. Two in particular stood out: one featured the Prophet wearing a “bomb” turban, the other featured him on a cloud meeting three suicide bombers arriving (we presume) in Paradise with the line, “Stop, stop, we ran out of virgins!”
The cartoons, measured by a secular, Western yardstick, were not exceptional. A few were mere stylized representations. The pictures were not ferocious caricatures—compared with the ferocious U.K. Cartoon of the Year of Ariel Sharon eating Palestinian babies, they were timid and innocuous.
By the standards of a moderate religious sensibility, they were irreverent. By the standards of Muslim sensibility, they were beyond question blasphemous and insulting. The cartoons’ blasphemy does not hang on what many are calling the absolute prohibition against any picturing of the Prophet. The question of whether the Prophet may be represented in images or art is, I gather, not as determinatively settled as a lot of news accounts casually suggest. They are blasphemous because in Islam, as in fact in many or all the world’s main religions, mocking, deriding or disrespectfully or perversely invoking the deity is a definition of blasphemy.
Portions of the West may have forgotten what blasphemy is. The entertainment industry, with reference to Christianity in particular, seems never to have either known or cared. A picture of Kanye West wearing a crown of thorns, on the cover of Rolling Stone, is a blasphemy. The infamously celebrated Piss Christ—a crucifix in a jar of urine—is blasphemous even to my lapsed sensibility. And, of course, there’s Madonna’s career.
The Danish cartoons were published in September 2005 in Denmark, but the uproar over them—the simultaneous protests, riots and embassy-burnings they are said to have sparked—only reached a peak now, five months later. Most people reading the news may have wondered why there was such a gap between the publication and the outrage. And why, amid so many other quarrels between the West and the Muslim world, these twelve cartoons were capable of stirring such violent passions.
Part of the answer, and it seems to me an important point to underscore, is that it is not just the original twelve cartoons, but at least three others—all more offensive than any of the originals. One shows the Prophet with a pig’s snout, one features bestiality, another pedophilia.
These three were included in a “dossier” compiled by an imam in Denmark who took a tour of Muslim countries, showing them to state and religious leaders. Since that tour, he has been interviewed on Danish television about the additions, and one of the more insulting images has been shown to have been doctored.
We are not free to subtract this element from an account of the outrage. If there has been manipulation in the Muslim world of this story, and additionally, if more corrosive images have been deliberately added to the originals, corrosive images designed by their greater graphic and scatological detail to make outrage all but inescapable, then it is not just a story about twelve cartoons about Mohammed published in a Danish newspaper. It may be a bigger story about quite cynical and duplicitous manipulation, founded on a kernel of reality, then amplified with more ex
plosive material and fed into the context of suspicion, friction and misunderstanding between the West and the Muslim world.
If some Muslims are reacting to more than the pictures in a Danish newspaper, if they are reacting to strategically gathered, supplementary pictures of unqualified venom and uncompromising insult, placed before the Muslim world by the Danish imam, then the calls for apology from Western authorities are both premature and incomplete.
A story that looked like a spontaneous combustion between Western free speech and Muslim religiosity may contain more sly politics and subtle incitement than most headlines acknowledged. The Danish cartoonists may have supplied an occasion for much mischief, but the deeper mischief, it may turn out, was not their cartoons, but the supplemented dossier, the more gruesome and insulting representations associating their Prophet with truly unspeakable circumstances.
There is very much to be said about the contest, or friction, between the foundational democratic principle of free speech and the absolutes of religious belief.
I am far from convinced, however, that in this “cartoon debate” one faction has not attempted to rig the facts and—in part—achieve political goals under the cover of faith. If that is so, there’s a blasphemy all will agree on.
In the multitude of articles and Internet postings about the cartoon crisis, from the moment riots ensued and some of the cartoonists found their lives in jeopardy, it remains very surprising that the point made above, of how the crisis was managed, and in particular of how the three additional more-scurrilous-by-far drawings were inserted into the original twelve, is so rarely mentioned.
