Let’s all sneer at the rich folks
Especially if they’re doing something that looks like charity:
What is it about some people who feel the need to sneer at fundraising efforts like last night’s Hope for Haiti Now concert? “A bunch of self-serving celebrities”, they’re saying on Facebook and elsewhere today. “How much did THEY give?”
News flash: celebrities, like the rest of us, probably had other plans for how they were going to spend their Friday night and, being celebrities, they probably made their plans far more in advance than the rest of us. So the very fact they canceled said plans — and whatever money-making was involved — is still more than the average TV viewer, sitting at home on a Friday night shoveling Munchos into their mouth, did to help Haiti.
There is, you may be sure, precedent for this sort of thing, dating back a quarter-century. Recall, if you will, USA for Africa, the ad-hoc one-shot group who recorded “We Are the World” for Ethiopian famine relief in the mid-1980s. Author Reebee Garofalo was critical of the effort: the artists, he said, presumably riffing on the line “We’re saving our own lives,” were proclaiming “their own salvation for singing about an issue they will never experience on behalf of a people most of them will never encounter.”
Critic Dave Marsh wrote a couple of years later:
[M]any denied that the record would do any good at all, pointing out that even $50 million would do no more than dent the problem of drought, starvation and agricultural insufficiency in Ethiopia, and contending that MOR music intrinsically led to politics that were at best ineffective, at worst corrupt, because they were not sufficiently oppositional.
And that, I think, is the key: that bit about “not sufficiently oppositional.” Writing a check or singing a song just doesn’t sound involved enough. Compare “Sun City,” by Artists United Against Apartheid, which had far more street cred, perhaps simply because it sounded angrier. It was certainly more danceable.
Still, all such projects have one distinct limitation: the participants themselves, as a rule, are not going to go to the Hellhole of the Month and kick ass. And it doesn’t matter whether ass-kicking would make the slightest bit of difference: if you’re not getting yourself in the midst of things, say our cultural arbiters, you’re some kind of poseur, and you may as well stay on your couch with your bag of Munchos.
This particular viewpoint is just jam-packed with cynicism. Marsh, on “We Are the World” again:
British critic Simon Frith … reported that, after a symposium in which [Greil] Marcus and others roasted charity rock for several hours, an assemblage of rebel-rock critics and scholars was shown the video made for “We Are the World.” “The mocking mood was soon stilled and, by the end, viewers were quite emotional,” Frith wrote. “‘Damn it,’ said someone, tears on his face, ‘the bastards always get you’.”
The real question is whether it’s always wrong to be gotten or whether the rebel-rock prejudice against ever being reconciled to the world around amounts, in the end, to hostility to everything alive.
In the meantime, I suppose we can all start wearing “Stop Plate Tectonics” T-shirts to show our level of concern.
McGehee »
24 January 2010 · 10:01 am
I’m pretty sure the average TV viewer would have been pleased as punch to know the defenders of celebrity charity events thinks so highly of the public whose attention makes celebrities so, well, celebrated. After all, it’s the celebrity that supposedly makes the event so worthwhile, no?
Besides, how much time does Joe Muncho-Shoveler have to work to earn whatever pittance he contributed to Haiti relief, compared to Heather Celebrity’s one Friday night? And given the unemployment rate these days, how many other members of the Muncho-Shoveler clan did Joe have to pick up the slack for with his pittance?
But there I go again. Maybe Joe and his family should just eat cake.
CGHill »
24 January 2010 · 10:08 am
By coincidence, this is the first weekend in four that I didn’t actually buy a bag of Munchos.
And I steer clear of proportional weighting: to me, it veers uncomfortably close to that “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need” business. If we must be measured by the standards of Marx, let it be Harpo.
Wednesday, I suppose, I can go pick up some cake.
Venomous Kate »
24 January 2010 · 11:13 am
Mmmmm…. cake.
McGehee »
24 January 2010 · 11:55 am
As a paradigm for charity, I think the ability/need formulation is at least as good as any.
It’s when it becomes government policy that everything goes to Norway.
Lisa Paul »
24 January 2010 · 12:19 pm
“Going to the Hellhole” doesn’t absolve a celebrity from the scorn of Joe MuchoMuncher. REmember when Sean Penn and Harry Connick Jr. went to New Orleans and were manning boats and pulling people out of the water?
Unfortunately there are always more people who would rather do nothing but criticize. It’s so much easier.
McGehee »
24 January 2010 · 12:38 pm
Who did Penn ever pull out of the water but himself?
Let’s be clear: people made fun of Penn’s New Orleans adventure because he made a fool of himself for the publicity, as usual.
Connick, on the other hand — I never heard anything at all about Connick’s efforts, which by itself suggests he was there to do something, rather than to be seen.
I think most of the Muncho-Shoveler clan would like very much not to be slammed just because their B.S. detectors work.
Lisa Paul »
24 January 2010 · 8:07 pm
I actually saw film footage and a report (CNN, BBC?) of both of them working on rescue crews. In fact, Penn rounded up and paid for a number of rowboats for those efforts. And this was BEFORE FEMA figured out a way to get in there. Connick, Jr., is of course, a favorite son of New Orleans and was working primarily in the neighborhoods where he got his start as a musician. So both of them can be said to have put their personal safety, as well as their money, on the line.
But everyone doesn’t have to make the grand effort. A small contribution, an evening manning telephone lines or maybe just cheering from the sidelines might be enough.
Lisa Paul »
24 January 2010 · 9:26 pm
I should mention that I’m also judging Penn and Connick’s contribution based on the opinions of those more qualified to render an opinion. About a year after Katrina, I rerouted a planned vacation to New Orleans. In the course of that trip, I spoke with dozens of residents and they all had high praise for both Penn and Connick and any other celebrity who helped keep the spotlight on NOLA. Especially at a time when New Orleaneans felt they were being ignored by an air-guitar playing President and a shoe-shopping Sec’ty of State. I figure if they thought Penn’s and Connick’s efforts helped, they were the authorities.
I was also surprised at the praise I got for just being there. With few chains, almost all your tourist dollars go directly into the New Orleans economy. It was an embarrassingly easy contribution to make, but it was something.
Jeff Brokaw »
25 January 2010 · 6:31 am
Cynicism is the only proper way to view anything to do with celebrity and the media. Even though sometimes you’ll be wrong, most of the time you’ll be dead-on.
Haiti was already a hellhole before the earthquake. The media and celebrity machine didn’t care about Haiti then. So now, for a while, the media will cover it 24×7 while the ratings are good, to fatten the bottom line, and celebrities will lend their celebrity to the cause until there is a new shiny object in the fish tank. Then at some point, all of them will recede into the night, leaving Haiti once again a hellhole with no economy, too dependent on foreign aid to ever become a big-boy country.
So, while it’s nice that money is being raised for an emergency and it will help real people, there is a bigger picture here that is being ignored, and it dooms people to disease and death mainly because of a lack of clean water.
But don’t believe me, go ye and read Mountains Beyond Mountains by Dr. Paul Farmer. An eye-opening, inspiring, and very useful book about public health policy.
Lisa Paul »
25 January 2010 · 2:24 pm
Although I don’t believe celebrities can be blamed for only stepping into Haiti in a crisis. After all, they aren’t humanitarian organizations. They are celebrities.
I think decades of US policy — under Democratic and Republican Presidents — is largely to blame for Haiti’s situation. And before that, the colonial mismanagement/exploitation of the French. So what if people do the right thing and help because it’s 1) fashionable for the moment 2) good PR 3) their publicist tells them to 4) they want to keep up with Brangelina? Unless we are Mother Theresa, most of us do things for ulterior motives. (And who’s to say the Sainted Mother wasn’t just gathering brownie points for Heaven?) At least, if only temporarily, the right thing was done. So hold the sneering and let’s give kudos for that.
I think a lot of criticism is misdirected here.