In other news
"Probably the greatest thing that's ever been organized, in the history of the world ever," announced Chris Martin of pop-act Coldplay on TV just now.
I know what you're thinking. He's discovered Finnegans Fisted. Turns out it's something else entirely different.
Entirely different? Well, I'm in the business of swotting away apostrophies of ignorance from Finnegan's Wake, as if flies from the faces of impoverished Africans. That's a similie, which functions as a symbol, containing the twinned messages for society of: "Make Poverty History" and "Do Apostrophie's Properly."
That's the sort of worthiness and properness my dreary English teacher always insisted Literature was about. Therefore I'm a Writer and I make a Contribution. Brilliant news, just like Live8. (Or maybe not?)
Which fister of poverty is up on the stage, beamed out across the world like a blog, next? He's singing "you won't fool the children of the revolution", and his name is Pete Doherty, and he looks like this:
Correcting mistakes world-wide aswell.
posted by Fist @ 1:43 PM
32 Comments:
Those who know everything about Africa (and anything else for that matter) have a lot to learn!
Surely if you know everything about everything, you don't really have much else to learn?!
My view is that if Live8 accomplishes something like the changes they seek, and they wouldn't have happened otherwise, then that's cool. But a lot of the cultural stuff that comes with it - the self-valorisation, the heroism of rock stars, the sense that everyday cliches have a knowing mastery over history - makes me want to puke shit through my eyes.
I hope some sense of that was present in the post.
If you think you know everything about everything it's pretty clear to me that you know nothing about anything! Live8 will accomplish throwing money at the problem. If that is progress then hooray! Yes some sense of puking shit through the eyes was present in the post but since I have been puking shit through mine for years about this sort of thing I forgot to mention that I 'got it' :)
I was just involved in the greatest bowel movement, ever, in the history of the world!
Musical talent and/or popularity doesn't necessarily act as an indicator of any other kind of ability or aptitude.
Just because you have a podium doesn't mean you are obliged to use it, especially when you don't possess the necessary equipment.
But on the other hand, Snoop Doggy Dogg was pretty cool.
Did he bring the pound?
"He raised the temperature with a racy rendition of his hip-hop hits and got one of the most energetic responses of the concert so far. Fans were waving their hands in the air like they just didn't care."
- BBC website. Hee hee.
but they did care right? because without them Africa is lost to the world, right? I mean there is just no way for them to get it together on their own. Of course not.
The messages of the event are:
1 double the aid sent to the world's poorest countries,
2 fully cancel their debts,
3 change the trade laws so that they can build their own future.
You'd argue for less aid, more debt, same economics?
no, something else far more empowering.
I am not knocking money, we need money, everybody needs money. It makes all kinds of problems go away - temporarily. However, Africa's problems are not about money.
What should Geldolf et al have been singing for, then? That G8 leaders can implement via their remit?
Hey Geldof can sing away, and raise as much money as he wants, we'll take it. All of it and enjoy what it brings, we will. I don't have a problem with do-gooders singing for Africa's supper. The point I was trying to make was that there are better ways of providing for sustainable development than handing out fish i.e. teaching men to fish and more....getting them to the point where they actually actively want to. So sing away but don't forget where the real solutions lie and don't make the mistake of thinking that the two are the same.
Hmm... in fact the point of the Live8 thing wasn't to raise any money at all, it was to apply political pressure...
or in a nutshell: such concerts noble as they are, are a contribution, not a solution.
What happens after you flick the button on your TV? All thoughts of Africa may subside apart from a gay sense of well-being because 'oh somebody is doing something' Think about it. When we think of 'everyman' who do we see in our mind's eye? the poor black African? I think not. That is what needs to change. In my, albeit, humble opinion: Africa needs to get a grip and start realising its own worth in the international arena. (you know I was really hoping you weren't going to ask, though of course I knew you would :)
applying political pressure translates into increased funds for Africa therefore concert = money! I am a lateral thinker. ;)
we saw this kind of thing in the 60's too you know and it didn't achieve all that much then either. Ultimately governments do: oh lookee - exactly what benefits them financially (and you can break that down whichever way you like). It's still about money in the end. Governments need to protect their interests after all. Which is precisely my point about African governments needing to get a grip.
eek, I'm getting all foamy around the mouth. Nice concert, cool bands and stuff....
Incidentally, if you click on the "Or maybe not" link above, and then the "More..." link in that post, you get some far more critical perspectives on the gig than yours or mine. Although your Everyman comment is very close to what Lenin wrote about the Other (the Other is a sort-of philosophical and psychoanalytical concept that's trendy at the moment in certain academic circles.)
Obviously debt relief and doubling aid are pretty much cash injections. Trade rules, as I understand them, have very different implications though. I'll have a read through the Economist tomorrow at work anyway, I'm not good at this stuff at all.
Saying governments are only interested in wealth-creation is an very cynical Marxist cliche, you know! I really don't believe it's generally true, just handy for making distant figures easy to blame.
most of the (unfortunate) way in which the world works is based on finance and commerce and it is here too in many ways that solutions might be found.
gold, diamonds, coffee, chocolate, you name it Africa has it and could profit from it, if they ran their governments better, stopped fighting silly wars and got into the business of running a government. And yes, the super-powers of today are where they are from the blood, sweat and tears of their forefathers and their ability to manage money well and at the right time for the good of their people. Governments might not be soley interested in wealth-creation but when it counts they will be. If there was a choice between humanitarian aims and their own security I really don't see that they have any other choice but to protect their own interests which is why Africa needs to start protecting theirs.
so I wasn't blaming distant G8 figures but African governments themselves for (at least some of, possibly much of) its own demise.
What you're talking about is nation-hood, ie nation-states acting as if individual actors in their own self-interest - and assuming that 'self-interest' has a coherent meaning internally, over the whole of the country...
Wanna here some sociology about this kind of thing?
sure thing! love to hear it! I suppose what I am talking about is responsibility and accountability or we could just wait for a hand out. Which do you think is better? I think several African nations are a tad too comfortable relying on foreign aid. And it's not necessarily impossible to change that. So while all this commentary might be sounding a touch cynical and negative I am really saying :hey guys get out there and make it happen for yourselves, dare to dream of a better future. I don't think that is an impossibility.
Blair is a Third Wayer, which means he's more likely to say here's some short-term money if you can show us you're doing something long-term with it. The problems in Britain with the Third Way has largely, it seems to me, to have been bureaucratic, it's lead to enormous and cumbersome auditting bureaucracies. Dunno if something similar is likely to happen internationally.
Sociologists would say that countries, the sort of things one sees drawn on maps, aren't necessarily the same as 'nation-states'. A nation is an 'imagined community', ie a largish group of people, who do not know anything like the majority of each other personally at all (hence: imagined) who nonetheless feel themselves to be legitimately subjects of the same forms of power (ie: community.) A state, in the modern sense, is an area governed from a centre, typically that centre controls violence (armies for external reasons, police for internal reasons), information (eg for tax purposes), amongst the other more obvious institutions.
Clearly there's some cross over of the terms. Britain is a nation-state, but within it England is a nation-without-state, because we have no separate state to the British one - unlike Scotland and Wales - but are an imagined community. So these terms need some flexibility.
Anyway. Assuming countries are all nation-states has been one of the pit-falls of the Western. Iraq, for instance, is definitely not a nation, becomes lots of the populous do not believe themselves part of Iraq but as part of something else. Hence it was kept from civil war by a tyrannical state under Saddam, and is now disintegrating. Nationhood may grow, as it did in colonies, but civil war is also probable. This never appeared to occur to the planners of the war.
My guess is that a lot of African countries aren't nation-states either, in lots and lots of ways. Nation-states appear natural to lots of people - of course we live in countries! - but in fact were invented in Modernity. Even vast Empires from before our civilisation weren't like this; they rather had city-states with their own armies, tax-raising operations, albeit with links on top of that to the centre of the Empire.
The fact that lots of countries aren't nation-states isn't the only reason why countries often fail to act like self-interested individual actors as above. The other is globalisation. A lot of people think globalisation means something like the spread of capitalism, perhaps with some links to American imperialism.
In fact, this is just the crude way it's been adopted by protestors looking for a clever word to shout about. For instance, the first popularly reported thing that was definitely globalized was poison in the mid-80s, where chemicals from northern Europe was found in the flesh of Antartican penguins. Poison is a product of industrialisation, which while often closely allied with capitalistic endeavours, is a separate dimension to capitalism in Modernity. You can have industrialism without capitalism, as in the USSR, and capitalism without industrialism, eg in the work of pimps. The other dimensions of modernity that have become or are becoming globalised are to do with violence and information, ie acts of violence can have global consequences eg 9/11, and as for information - well, here I am, there you are, and what's all this?
Anyway - globalisation means cause and effect is increasingly stretched over the earth's space-time. A decision twenty years ago in a chemical laboratory in North Dakota leads to an agricultural product that wipes out frogs in South East Asia thirty years from tomorrow. Time-space distanciation is the technical term. Anyone who says globalisation and looks blank when hit with that doesn't have a real intellectual grasp on the terms.
Obviously globalisation has always been there to an extent - it's just the intensity and scale that makes it so significant nowadays. So significant, in fact, that it undermines the viability of nation-states acting as independent actors in the way mentioned before. Why? Lots of reasons, eg
Sociological ones. Knowledge about alternative ways of being, from other parts of the globe, are available all the time to everyone via media, and help undermine traditional forms of community, authority and being, including the sense of belonging to a nation or imagined community.
Economic ones. Economic freedom means corporations act transnationally and undermine the finances of states. Countries rely on corporations for jobs to tax. Tax is too high in country X? Move to country Y. So country X has less wealth to tax, whilst the corporation grows and grows.
anyway... tiz late. I'm off to bed. Maybe this discussion will continue tomorrow!
maybe it will, but right now I feel a little like Johnny Mnemonic and I need to get this wet-wire data out of my head, possibly sans decapitation. Interesting topic though!
Here is a good introduction to the debates and academic context, which locates very clearly sociological terms in real-world contexts:
http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/meetthedirector/pdf/14-Nov-01.pdf
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