Horizon

Can't disagree a bit. It's a far cry from subsidizing a Mugabe-style murderous tyrrany, but much of the aid that was donated to Guinea-Conakry went towards buying apartment complexes in Montreal for relatives of the president. Using aid to build Khufu-like vanity projects is an improvement by comparison.

At two pm today--as Paul MaCartney, a vegetarian with henna-dyed hair in his seventh decade, performs a hellishly overrated novelty song he wrote thirty-nine years ago with an insufferably loud and pompous Irish rock band--the full flowering of the phenomena that, depending on how you see it, either began in a small Memphis recording studio fifty odd years ago or back in the caves when some shaggy haired homo-erectus started shaking down a rhythm with two flat stones and a smile for the ladies, will be reached.
Rock and Roll, in its strict guitars and drums format was rapidly invaded by prigs; a scant few years after Elvis Presley, Little Richard and the Upsetters (L.R's amusing bible bashing cannot be convincingly brought into court here), Chuck Berry etc the prigs and the po-faced were moving in from the folk angle dragging in dreary metaphor and politics, wagging fingers and feeling righteous. There were phalanxes of them them then; with counterparts everywhere. Some causes they espoused- notably civil rights in semi-fascist parts of America- were not only right, they were noble. But the trouble is with these kinds of social justice crusaders is that they turn into CS Lewis's omnipotent moral busybodies very quickly. This rising tendency-- the sort of po-faced librarians who banned Biggles and so--just got more organised. Lots of talk, quite rightly, about fascism; not too much about its mirror image, Communism. 'No, you've got it wrong,' condescend American lefties, 'you're talking about *Stalinism*; that's what Orwell was saying; no, say I; I'm talking about Communism. At this point any number of lefties I know reading this will stop and say something like this in a John Wayne accent: 'so all this goddam Live8 is just a commy plot eh?'
No; it's a vain plot- in both sense of the word. But i'll come back to that.
Getting back to the march of the prigs. Their ringleader was the ambiguous figure of Bob Dylan; by an irony a man I have always strongly suspected of being an isolationist American and a reactionary at heart (remember him at Live Aid mentioning American farmers?) And so what if he is? you cry. So what indeed.
Dylan's ambiguity is easy to explain: he did that thing where people adopt an attitude or pose until even they can't tell what was fake and what was real. The same thing's happened to rock and roll. Where Dylan stirred together a mix of beat-poetry, sour-faced agrarian holler, folk music and French symbolist poetry; rock and roll in the last thirty years has made a hotchpotch of specious protest, selective moral outrage, blatant and uninspired artistic rechauffe, tons of cash, and a grand sense of entitlement.
From the mid-sixties on, year by year, notwithstanding the great and powerful knees up acts of that epoch, the prigs gained a stronger hold. By the mid-seventies you had the posturing Clash; by the early eighties you had what you might have thought was the Ne Plus Ultra of Prig Rock: U2; but Coldplay et all had other ideas.
Perhaps people in the future will say: where were you on this day? I shall answer truthfully: in bed, reading The Nigger of the Narcissus (a darkly funny book with as much to say to the West today as its gigantic cousin Moby Dick) and then in the pub a bit and then roasting pork.
'AH LUXURY,' would say that invention of John Lennon, Bob Geldof; to which I would say that if giving the quid I paid for the book and the six quid in the pub and the money for the meat, heck even the money that was paid for house I'm sitting in and the chair I'm sitting on and the money for the barber that cut my hair and the bus I got on yesterday would MAKE ANY DIFFERENCE to the problems of Africa, I would do it.
Of course, a certain browbeating Irishness dominates this whole farrago of false piety- that whole swearing and jumping up and down and I'll shout and rant louder and more righteously than you (I sometimes wonder whether Hitler wasn't actually Irish- he had relatives in Liverpool, which is the capital of Ireland, after all). When Chris Martin of Coldplay, an English Public School Boy, spoke between songs at Glastonbury last weekend, he spoke in a crazy, put-on Irish accent. We could be looking at a cult.
If I lived in Africa and was starving and being tortured and beaten up I would very much like someone to come and help me; I would like that man to have a big heart and a big gun and I wouldn't be too worried what colour he was; I wouldn't think much of a bunch of vain, pesudo-intellectual pop stars who mealy-mouth African dictators and blame all of Africa's problems on Europe. It is of course a given that various European countries have behaved in insolent and exploitative ways in Africa; but let the first stone be cast- and for example look at Zimbabwe in 1980, and compare it with today...
This is where I despise the rock stars running this event and the fawning BBC behind them- they cannot allow their minds to press beyond a sixties-formed political correctness that the brute realities of life on that continent outstripped a long time ago. The message that will be implicit (and probably explicit) today is that it's all our fault, man, and that somehow, somehow cancelling the debt of the tyrants and thug politicians in Africa will mean they'll be nice to their people and recover a sense of decency and the millionair rock stars can go back to being rich and righteous in peace. That's the vain plot.
So this is an idea as weak but paradoxically pernicious as flower power was in the 60s. I notice the Rolling Stones declined to play Live8. They always had a firm grasp of the realities; indeed it was their diabolical rock concert at Altamont which dealt flower power a hefty punch to the kidneys. 'It wasn't the destruction of the sixties,' said the great Lester Bangs; 'it was the facing up.' Still; flower power survived it; and lived on in the sedulous forms of political correctness and rock-priggery.
'Just Gimme Some Truth,' yelled Lennon (one of the great architects of Rock Priggery; and in many respects Banquo at today's feast- I like to think he would have poured scorn on Live8) and yet all these years later we're still not getting it.
As they look out over the sea of faces at Hyde Park today (and over the slightly better appointed faces in the Corporate Hospitality area (the only place it is permitted to drink alcohol), the performers will believe they are giving the world the truth. I wonder whether they'll hear it Africa.

Yesterday's Done With Mirrors had a good post on German aid to Namibia as a case study of the sort of thing Alan's talking about.