Bono and Geldof are both in their own way assisting Tony Blair in saving those parts of the world they agree should be saved, that are being neglected and abandoned, or that they agree the public would most approve of their attempting to save, or should approve of it, or something near to that.
It's priorities, but the priorities aren't mentioned, let alone discussed. People are people, and the poor are the poor and that's that. As though 200 Bushmen are the equivalent of 200 urban street hustlers, morally and ethically.
Not discriminating - not saying "these should be first, those should be second" which is called, as most anyone who watches television these days knows, "triage" - is government by sentiment. There is no triage involved in Bono's world view.
In a very general perspective, from a long ways away, the hierarchy should be, in Africa - primitives first, then animals, then villages, then urban centers. But it goes just the opposite way, with the primitives on the bottom, the animals, as the interview with anonymous "Bushman C" below implies, are more valuable than the Bushmen themselves, because the animals are near and dear to the tourists who are at the top of the food chain, with the villagers slightly below the animals, and the urban Africans slightly above. American house pets are of more sentimental value to Bono's audience than African lions, which are of more value than African urban poor; who are of more sentimental value than the vanishing primitives, to Bono and Geldof, evidently; but I'm saying those primitives are of more real human value than anyone else.
The race to tempt and corrupt them is intense because of that. So that they can be held up as being just as venal and profane as all the rest, only dumber and less sophisticated.
We must be quick now.
This must end.
Government by sentiment is like medicine by sentiment, in the long run it causes much more harm than it does good, except for the increasingly petulant and desperate sentimentalists who are gratified by seeing their childish values played out on the world stage.
It also dishonors those unsentimental warriors at the front lines. Talk to a doctor or a nurse who's done time in a crisis zone, where the bodies are piling up and more are coming in by the hour and there is no medicine, or even clean water. "Triage", baby. It's all about triage.
Bono is acting out the infantile values of his viewing public; catharsis is his job, but he's an entertainer, transferring that power into the realm of policy is a bad thing, tempting because it offers easy answers to the hardest questions we have to answer now.
Who should live, and who should die?
The easy way out of that is saying everyone should live. But that means eventually people will die randomly or by attrition and neglect, which is what Bono and Geldof, and their fellow stalwart Tony Blair, are standing against, and the choices will then be made by disembodied corporate wisdom like that that's given us the Iraqi body count; or natural death will rise out of the corners of civilization and sweep across us all indiscriminately.
Which is not the same as "everyone should live".
Precisely that eventuality is best met by people who can live lightly and close to the ground, not by technology-addicts with a critical mass of millions.
It's a sickness of emotional immaturity, and it doesn't work. Certain kinds of people are sustained by those policies - the compromised, the adaptable, the refugees from village-living entering the metastasizing slums - while the true humans, the ones who carry ways of being that are proven by thousands of years of experience and tradition, are exterminated by economic machines like Chevron and de Beers, that Bono facilitates with his tacit disregard of the central part they play.
It's priorities, but the priorities aren't mentioned, let alone discussed. People are people, and the poor are the poor and that's that. As though 200 Bushmen are the equivalent of 200 urban street hustlers, morally and ethically.
Not discriminating - not saying "these should be first, those should be second" which is called, as most anyone who watches television these days knows, "triage" - is government by sentiment. There is no triage involved in Bono's world view.
In a very general perspective, from a long ways away, the hierarchy should be, in Africa - primitives first, then animals, then villages, then urban centers. But it goes just the opposite way, with the primitives on the bottom, the animals, as the interview with anonymous "Bushman C" below implies, are more valuable than the Bushmen themselves, because the animals are near and dear to the tourists who are at the top of the food chain, with the villagers slightly below the animals, and the urban Africans slightly above. American house pets are of more sentimental value to Bono's audience than African lions, which are of more value than African urban poor; who are of more sentimental value than the vanishing primitives, to Bono and Geldof, evidently; but I'm saying those primitives are of more real human value than anyone else.
The race to tempt and corrupt them is intense because of that. So that they can be held up as being just as venal and profane as all the rest, only dumber and less sophisticated.
We must be quick now.
This must end.
Government by sentiment is like medicine by sentiment, in the long run it causes much more harm than it does good, except for the increasingly petulant and desperate sentimentalists who are gratified by seeing their childish values played out on the world stage.
It also dishonors those unsentimental warriors at the front lines. Talk to a doctor or a nurse who's done time in a crisis zone, where the bodies are piling up and more are coming in by the hour and there is no medicine, or even clean water. "Triage", baby. It's all about triage.
Bono is acting out the infantile values of his viewing public; catharsis is his job, but he's an entertainer, transferring that power into the realm of policy is a bad thing, tempting because it offers easy answers to the hardest questions we have to answer now.
Who should live, and who should die?
The easy way out of that is saying everyone should live. But that means eventually people will die randomly or by attrition and neglect, which is what Bono and Geldof, and their fellow stalwart Tony Blair, are standing against, and the choices will then be made by disembodied corporate wisdom like that that's given us the Iraqi body count; or natural death will rise out of the corners of civilization and sweep across us all indiscriminately.
Which is not the same as "everyone should live".
Precisely that eventuality is best met by people who can live lightly and close to the ground, not by technology-addicts with a critical mass of millions.
It's a sickness of emotional immaturity, and it doesn't work. Certain kinds of people are sustained by those policies - the compromised, the adaptable, the refugees from village-living entering the metastasizing slums - while the true humans, the ones who carry ways of being that are proven by thousands of years of experience and tradition, are exterminated by economic machines like Chevron and de Beers, that Bono facilitates with his tacit disregard of the central part they play.
