Arts: Music & Politics Bush has anted up more $ for Africa than any US Prez, says Live 8's Geldof

The upcoming G8 Summit, the eight industrially most advanced countries plus Russia whose finance ministers have already agreed to remit all debt for 18 nations (mostly in Africa), is being upstaged by the petitioners who hope to mass with them multiplied millions as an audience for simultaneous live concerts in Europe and North America, all the while stroking the G8 summiteers to come thru with even more the first week in July. I'm not too hot on this. I did sign the petition, but the politics of the petition process so obstruded on even so simple a matter that I felt cheated. As soon as I signed, I got another message asking whether I wanted to send a copy of my particulars to the New Democrat Party. Now, how did they horn in on this? Were the petition circulators themselves up to the blatant dishonesty of giving a partisan twist to a campaign I thawt was to encourage Western governments like Canada's to come up in favour of debt remission for African countries? I doubt there's any really honest petition on such a mega-organized level; there's always an industry involved; there's always more motives moiling in the mix than a simple love for African people and wanting to help them out.

What's more, as soon as the G8 finance ministers made their agreement and announced on mostly-African debt remission, to a list of countries who had at the same time maintained democratic processes (Mugabe's Zimbabwe remains unlisted) and not aswim in massive corruption (Nigeria unlisted!), the Africa info service I receive by email, was all over me and hectoring me to send more insistent petitions to the Canuck guvs demanding more and more and more and more. My point is a simple one: we've seen these grandiose appeals and Trotskyist-style political demands that can't possibly be filled, so many times in my lifetime, that there's something that crawls into one's brain about the denial and dishonesty of pressing for ever more - when the finance ministers have come thru so postively. Just screaming for money because Africa is desperate, doesn't mean that, even were the money available, that I doubt Africa would benefit from this grandiose largesse but end up even worse off precisely because of its arrival.

We must not pour dollars on élites that will suck it into their own pockets as in most cases in the past (socialists excel at this seemingly capitalist game); we must not pour dollars that will encourage governments in economic lag-mode to generate ever larger populations with no infrastructure to educate and provide them jobs; we must not allow dictators to profit most from these gifts so that they can buy more and more armaments and conduct colonial wars against other African countries, and genocides against their own populations. All this is au courant in Africa in recent years and much of it right now.

Everyone assumes that there is a solution to Africa's over-all mess. I doubt it. I doubt there's any solution at all that could work effectvelyf here, for a very long time to come. Live Aid is putting out the figure that "50,000 Africans die every day of hunger." I don't doubt it; but I do doubt there is any real solution. There are millions of people in Africa desperate for food, as there are millions of people there desperate for sex on any given day or nite. The two facts are desperately related. How the infrastructures can be developed so that these grossly disproportionate numbers can be turned around, is a puzzlement to any one who cares more than actionism blame-ideologies permit. So much for all the actionistic philosophies and religions that think every problem is solvable wherever on the globe it is present in whatever scale of magnitude. I admire the people of compasssion who are indigenous to the countries of desperation and who come from afar to apply "bandaids" and who know that's what they're doing when they make their appeals year in and year out, day in and day out, here in North America. But where they honestly beg for help in applying their bandaids and oepning their feeding stations, is now debt remission and Live Aid visions of Europe/American govts whacking ever huger sums at the countries in jepopardy going to make the difference? Some difference, yes. But more largely, I don't think so. Rather, I think people who think so are part of the problem, especially those African intellectuals who detail and disseminate their theories about how everyone else, especially the Americans, are responsible for their woes.

However, I too wish it were otherwise. And every now and then, one momentarily junks a lifetime of analysis and reflection and petition signing into the void of impossiblity, and one feels a little surge of utopian hope, triggered by some inconsequential irrelevant detail. In my case, it's Geldof's appearance in France on behalf of the Paris Live Aid Concert coming up, insisting to the French in so many words, Look you lunkheads, Bush has gotten more funding for African needs than any American prez, and he's doing a hell of lot better than you Bush-hating chiraqoids and socialistas multipluralissimas. Geldof, Bono, and the filmaker Richard Curtis have united to do something audacious, in requiring cut the crap (LOL, guys) of the Bush-hating entertainers on stage, and thusly moving the hearts of Presidents and Prime Ministers to go against the rational weighing of the possiblities of a dollar-drop on Africa. That's not where change will come from, I know. But, why not give it a try, if Geldof tries his level best to keep the crap from flowing out of the crapmouths of the song business of the Western world. -Owlb


Interview with Live Aid II