HelloAngel
ONE love, blood, life
http://www.suntimes.com/
Can Bono's fame cure apathy toward Africa?
December 6, 2002
BY NEIL STEINBERG SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST
'There is a monotony about the injustices suffered by the poor that perhaps accounts for the lack of interest the rest of society shows in them,'' cultural critic Dwight Macdonald wrote in 1963. "Everything seems to go wrong with them. They never win. It's just boring.''
That of course is both a monstrously callous statement and absolutely true. We don't care about the poor--not really, not the poor in our own city, and certainly not the poor suffering way over in Africa.
Oh, there are certain large-hearted people who devote themselves to helping others, and I don't want to diminish the value of what they do.
But as a rule, people generally--in America and everywhere else--have their faces firmly planted in the silage, munching away on ESPN, People magazine, crocheting, Game Cubes and beer.
Every so often--every five years or so, it seems--some utter nightmare reaches a sufficiently epic scale that it hits the news, despite occurring in Africa, and we look up, chewing still, take in the jarring photographs of suffering and misery as they flash across the screen, emit a grunt of faux concern, then drop our heads back into the trough.
So it was unusual to have the issue of the AIDS time bomb in Africa dragged into the Sun-Times on Wednesday and plopped on the table by the improbable figure of Irish rock singer Bono, front man of the group U2. (I explain this because, when I told my mother Bono was visiting, she said, in all seriousness--and I quote--"I liked him when he had his show with Cher.'')
As I said, very few people heave themselves out of their routine lives on the behalf of others, particularly busy, successful, famous people, and usually when famous people do try, it comes off as awkward and weird--think of Babs Streisand. The most exceptional thing about our hour with Bono was its unexceptionalness--he went around, shaking hands, as if he were the director of the United Federation of Dull Civic Organizations, then sat down and spoke, clearly and intelligently, about the AIDS problem.
"Two and a half million Africans are going to die next year from AIDS, and that's unacceptable,'' he said. "There will be 25 million AIDS orphans by the end of the decade.''
The only strange moment came from Ashley Judd--an actress, I was later told--who said a few words before standing up, announcing she had to do her makeup, and disappearing.
Bono is trying, basically, to use his celebrity as a club to crack through America's utter indifference to things African (even African Americans, I've found, don't much want to know about disasters in Africa--they'd rather view it positively, as a source of pride and heritage, and the harsh realities be dismissed as sour grapes). Bono wants us to spend more, do more, care more. It's a daunting task, one that he compared with landing a man on the moon, although it's an unfair comparison because turning the AIDS crisis around in Africa will cost more and be less successful.
As to why the United States should do this, when we have problems at home unsolved, Bono cited the nation's greatness of spirit while offering up a rather unpersuasive list of selfish reasons we should exercise that greatness by battling AIDS in Africa: to polish our image, so Africans will think better of us and not become terrorists, so the fixing of AIDS in Africa might wash back onto us and help AIDS here.
A better argument--too altruistic for Bono to suggest to this great country--struck me as this: They're people, we're people, they're in need, we can help them. Or, as this newspaper editorialized last year: "When the material plenty of life in the United States is juxtaposed with the biblical suffering of Africa, we are reminded that our humanity demands we keep our eyes on Africa and help her where we can.''
Miracles can be wrought by money and effort--international health authorities went door-to-door across two continents to eradicate smallpox. The AIDS epidemic in Africa, like most disasters, is not the result of one factor--say, a stingy, selfish United States--but of many: corrupt, incompetent governments, lack of medical infrastructure, an uneducated, dirt-poor population. Bono is absolutely right when he says we should care more and do more. And maybe we have to think the problem is in our grasp in order to do so. But as he spoke, saying, in essence, that this entire thing was in our control and history will judge us harshly if we don't fix it, I detected the underpinnings of a very noxious idea--that Africa was somehow ours to save or ignore, that America holds the puppet strings of the world in its hands and can manipulate reality at its whim. Kipling's line about taking up the white man's burden pressed against my teeth, but I swallowed it back. I don't want to be the guy who convinced Bono to go back to sitting poolside.
Some of my colleagues clustered around Bono as he left, warming their hands over his celebrity, clamoring for autographs, which was doubly unseemly considering why he was here ("Yes, yes, tens of millions will die. Now could you sign this CD for my sister?"). I was left thinking of Kipling, and of Macdonald's cynical, but also very true, coda. Once in a while, he wrote, the public shakes off its indifference and becomes aroused over the misfortunes of others. "But the arousement,'' he wrote, "never leads to much." Maybe this will be different.
Can Bono's fame cure apathy toward Africa?
December 6, 2002
BY NEIL STEINBERG SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST
'There is a monotony about the injustices suffered by the poor that perhaps accounts for the lack of interest the rest of society shows in them,'' cultural critic Dwight Macdonald wrote in 1963. "Everything seems to go wrong with them. They never win. It's just boring.''
That of course is both a monstrously callous statement and absolutely true. We don't care about the poor--not really, not the poor in our own city, and certainly not the poor suffering way over in Africa.
Oh, there are certain large-hearted people who devote themselves to helping others, and I don't want to diminish the value of what they do.
But as a rule, people generally--in America and everywhere else--have their faces firmly planted in the silage, munching away on ESPN, People magazine, crocheting, Game Cubes and beer.
Every so often--every five years or so, it seems--some utter nightmare reaches a sufficiently epic scale that it hits the news, despite occurring in Africa, and we look up, chewing still, take in the jarring photographs of suffering and misery as they flash across the screen, emit a grunt of faux concern, then drop our heads back into the trough.
So it was unusual to have the issue of the AIDS time bomb in Africa dragged into the Sun-Times on Wednesday and plopped on the table by the improbable figure of Irish rock singer Bono, front man of the group U2. (I explain this because, when I told my mother Bono was visiting, she said, in all seriousness--and I quote--"I liked him when he had his show with Cher.'')
As I said, very few people heave themselves out of their routine lives on the behalf of others, particularly busy, successful, famous people, and usually when famous people do try, it comes off as awkward and weird--think of Babs Streisand. The most exceptional thing about our hour with Bono was its unexceptionalness--he went around, shaking hands, as if he were the director of the United Federation of Dull Civic Organizations, then sat down and spoke, clearly and intelligently, about the AIDS problem.
"Two and a half million Africans are going to die next year from AIDS, and that's unacceptable,'' he said. "There will be 25 million AIDS orphans by the end of the decade.''
The only strange moment came from Ashley Judd--an actress, I was later told--who said a few words before standing up, announcing she had to do her makeup, and disappearing.
Bono is trying, basically, to use his celebrity as a club to crack through America's utter indifference to things African (even African Americans, I've found, don't much want to know about disasters in Africa--they'd rather view it positively, as a source of pride and heritage, and the harsh realities be dismissed as sour grapes). Bono wants us to spend more, do more, care more. It's a daunting task, one that he compared with landing a man on the moon, although it's an unfair comparison because turning the AIDS crisis around in Africa will cost more and be less successful.
As to why the United States should do this, when we have problems at home unsolved, Bono cited the nation's greatness of spirit while offering up a rather unpersuasive list of selfish reasons we should exercise that greatness by battling AIDS in Africa: to polish our image, so Africans will think better of us and not become terrorists, so the fixing of AIDS in Africa might wash back onto us and help AIDS here.
A better argument--too altruistic for Bono to suggest to this great country--struck me as this: They're people, we're people, they're in need, we can help them. Or, as this newspaper editorialized last year: "When the material plenty of life in the United States is juxtaposed with the biblical suffering of Africa, we are reminded that our humanity demands we keep our eyes on Africa and help her where we can.''
Miracles can be wrought by money and effort--international health authorities went door-to-door across two continents to eradicate smallpox. The AIDS epidemic in Africa, like most disasters, is not the result of one factor--say, a stingy, selfish United States--but of many: corrupt, incompetent governments, lack of medical infrastructure, an uneducated, dirt-poor population. Bono is absolutely right when he says we should care more and do more. And maybe we have to think the problem is in our grasp in order to do so. But as he spoke, saying, in essence, that this entire thing was in our control and history will judge us harshly if we don't fix it, I detected the underpinnings of a very noxious idea--that Africa was somehow ours to save or ignore, that America holds the puppet strings of the world in its hands and can manipulate reality at its whim. Kipling's line about taking up the white man's burden pressed against my teeth, but I swallowed it back. I don't want to be the guy who convinced Bono to go back to sitting poolside.
Some of my colleagues clustered around Bono as he left, warming their hands over his celebrity, clamoring for autographs, which was doubly unseemly considering why he was here ("Yes, yes, tens of millions will die. Now could you sign this CD for my sister?"). I was left thinking of Kipling, and of Macdonald's cynical, but also very true, coda. Once in a while, he wrote, the public shakes off its indifference and becomes aroused over the misfortunes of others. "But the arousement,'' he wrote, "never leads to much." Maybe this will be different.
