16.12.2004
'Thank god it's them...'
Bob Geldof's charity-mongering is back this Christmas. Nathaniel Mehr looks behind the hype
Of course on a purely immediate, humanist level it’s clear that raising money for starving children is never going to be a bad thing per se. But in every other respect, Band Aid 20’s redone Christmas single is an aberration. The original Do they know it’s Christmas?, and its accompanying fundraising concerts, at least helped bring previously ignored suffering to the attention of the popular consciousness, and for this we could perhaps forgive it for having also prolonged the careers of several decaying big-hair dinosaur-rockers. The whole thing reeked of liberal guilt, but there was for the most part a genuine innocence about it, and one way or another certain boundaries were crossed.
In 2004 we know all about ‘third world’ starvation; the argument goes that we have in fact become numb to it, and that therefore once in a while we need an event like a Band Aid 20 release to ‘remind us’ how lucky we are. The idea seems to be that a recently laid-off factory worker in Manchester, or a single mother on an estate, rather than equating his or her situation with that of the starving child in Africa on account of the fact that they are both subjects to the same world economic system, must instead detach themselves from the African problem, and just be grateful it’s not them who’s starving (‘Well, tonight - thank god - it’s them instead of you’). The situation is alien, ‘third world’, detached. So the argument is that because we have become numb to suffering, we must respond by repackaging our guilt in an updated, more facile way. The desired effect is a state of permanent gratitude on both sides; dependency is perpetuated, while our consciences are satisfied.
Of course the giver-receiver relationship can only be seen to be beneficial in the context of a certain perceived world order: that is to say, we must not consider economic structures and the essential role they play in bringing about the poverty in question. Without a revolutionary change in the world economic structure, all the charity in the world won’t stop babies starving - the very ‘necessity’ of another Band Aid record is a grim testament to this. But of course the liberal conscience wants to keep things simple, or else it would have little to gain from such an initiative in terms of a ‘feel good factor’ of its own; nor would it want to compromise its future status as ‘giver’ or ‘reliever of suffering’, with Bob Geldof as its messianic, sandaled saviour.
And for this reason we are told the following things on the record: “[Africa,] Where nothing ever grows/No rain nor rivers flow.” This valuable insight, sung this time around by Time Out-friendly Miss Dynamite and Beverly Knight (they’re black so, like, they would know) quite conveniently reaffirms the decades-old misconception that Africa’s problems are almost entirely due to geographical factors. African poverty? Oh it’s the weather, innit?
“Where the only water flowing/Is the bitter sting of tears ... Underneath the burning sun.” Meanwhile anyone who dares criticise the project is dismissed out of hand as a pessimist, a killjoy or ‘hater’; as with so much else on the neoliberal agenda, you’re either with them or against them.
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| Smug, smug and smug |
But this piece is not a case of stubborn, dogmatic asceticism - it’s the result of a pure objectivity, stripped free of the ideological dead-end thinking of free market fundamentalism, and no amount of head-in-the-sand name-calling will change that. When we righteously bestow our celebrities - be they overfed comedians or dated rockers - onto other countries, we are exporting the very cheapest products of a decaying culture, in order to spread the culture of passivity and servility that allowed them to flourish in the first place. The idea is that we replace progress and autonomy with false gods and dependency.
In the documentary accompanying the recent Band Aid release, Mr Geldof could be seen on television wheeling on an African woman who had been saved from starvation by donations from the original Live Aid. He prompts her to thank him, and then sends her on her way.
The people who brought you this record are beneath contempt: to try and understand the world’s problems is one thing; to trivialise and cheapen them in the name of humanism is quite another. Thanks to a host of top names and the attendant emotional blackmail of such releases, it was sure to be a hit. Some people will argue that even though it’s not going to change the world, it’ll raise lots of money and that can’t be a bad thing, and they may be right - it’s better to save one child than none at all.
Alternatively, if we consider the net result of projects like this - the trivialisation of the issue in the popular consciousness, the perpetuation of a culture of charity, the affirmation of false myths to explain human suffering, pandering to smugness, the strengthening of a misguided liberal consensus, the stunting of political consciousness in young people - in this country alone, it is highly likely that, over the long term, these projects may yet do more harm than good in terms of ‘fighting poverty’ in Africa, even by the liberals’ own favoured body-count barometer.
Commentators like Frances Fukuyama told us that the fall of the Berlin Wall signalled the “end of history”; so our school system is obediently phasing out linguistics and history in exchange for GCSEs in marketing and ‘vocational courses’ for the surplus population; capitalism is here to stay, and in a context which precludes alternatives the options really are black and white, and charity is indeed the only way to respond to injustice, to quell the humanist yearning within us.
As such the philanthropist is a reactionary in the tradition of the SS death-squads and the tanks of Tiananmen Square - he is, if anything, more of a danger because of the moral legitimacy - and hence popular credibility - afforded to him by the apparent humanism of his cause.