It seems obvious, but I am willing to break into my summer holiday from blogging to note it: Live8 and the Make Poverty History campaign are a shocking abuse of people’s trust and intentions.
Live8 was a shameless day of self promotion by a bunch of people far richer than me parading their high morals in a sort of guilt-cleansing strip show. The idea behind it was even worse: with our rock star heroes, we are supposed to go cap-in-hand to the leaders of the G8, and ask them to make things better. BUT – we’re not allowed to mention, to suggest, that it might be those fat bastards who are to blame for the problems we’re all so upset about. That wouldn’t do.
There is no real moral equivalent for what’s been going on over the last few days but it is a little like asking the BNP to ‘fix the racist issue’ and then just leave them to it.
The leaders of G8 – some of the most powerful men in the world – should not be trusted. They have their power not because they are kings or lords, but because they have risen to power with the backing of big business. He who pays the piper, and so on.
There’s this creepy feeling now that whenever we discuss political change and solving the problems of the world, someone – sounding like the latest looping Coldplay noise – has to say “Oh well, obviously we can’t change the way we live” or “Socialism’s dead, so it’s best to just forget about it” or “There are some things that just never change – lets try and work with what we’ve got”.
No. What we’ve got is rotten and unstable. We’ve built our great nations on the rape of Africa. No one at G8 or at the Live8 concerts is really interested in changing that, because the changes we would all need to make are so huge that it’s much easier to just lie about it or close our eyes.
We need to change the way we live, the way we travel, the way we eat and the expectations we have from life. The reason these facts are being ignored is that our leaders have us hooked on all this crap we have around us at the moment: cheap, cheerful and shallow, but with just enough sugar to keep us going. If you try to take a look at life in 2005 from a distance, it’s really worrying just how flimsy and stupefying things have become. And it’s only going to get worse.
Hey, Live8, Make Poverty History, Angelina fucking Jolie, Tony Blair, Ronald MacDonald, Dido, Bob Geldof, Gordon Brown, Stevie Wonder, and the rest of you: this is one man saying I don’t give a fuck what you think. I am not interested in your warped morality or your perverse charity. You are wrong. Y esta.