Love Actually had more meaning...and Christmas!

For starters. Something to grow on (Thanks, Max!). Since the general election campaign began back in the harried days of aught-four, cynicism the word, in practice and meaning, has been turning cartwheels around the globe. If one mouths the right words, whether they're "compassionate conservatism" or "soft bigotry of low expectations" (a phrase that more aptly describes my feelings about music year-to-date) or "charity" or "direct action" into an echo chamber of even lower expectations: public discourse. That it's even a question whether Bob Geldof acted cynically in arranging token events around the world to "generate awareness" blows my mind; hasn't the poverty wracked economic South been the butt of countless jokes in the interim? Didn't Harvard president Lawrence Summers claim that areas of Africa are in fact "underpolluted" (read Doug Henwood - he's great)and that they have saleable resources (namely those underpolluted areas) which may be used as pollution credits by industry?

Yet there are those who felt that partaking in the Haterade (the putativel nonconformist's default mode for preserving friendships through passive aggressive behaviors rather than directly confronting issues through discourse, public or private) for Live 8 was itself an act of cynicism rather than clear-headed, if not tough-minded, realism. Why should 10 cities be beggared by a charity concert that doesn't raise money (and please don't tell me that hotel tax revenues will cover the costs), and instead opts to "raise awareness"? I thought we were already aware that Coldplay had a new album?

If nothing else, Geldof succeeded in creating the sort of celebrity smokescreen that eschews conflict while maintaining the semantics of class struggle. These affairs don't work for any issues; how can one separate the interest in "the cause" from the interest in the lineup? A free concert is a free concert after all, and even with sophisticated multivariate regression who even cares about the answers? While I agree with Nick about the importance of several causes, rather than focusing on just one (fetishizing one continent's poverty does tend to breed reactionary contempt), these events do very little to change minds or perceptions, or should we all take Toby Keith's acceptance in Philadelphia as the hallmark tolerance of virtuous American hatred? At least we had the good sense to boo Santa Claus!

If this is indicative of global political myopia, or just middle-class self-assuredness that things will all work out ("It's all good" being the enduring mantra of the fin de siecle American belief system), then isn't there some way to see these things as contributing factors in even larger problems? Is liberalism so bankrupt as to not see how unifying factors help us understand complex problems with increasing simplicity? Can't music and artists direct us, however minimally, toward those greater ideas rather than hone in on a grandiose and perverse bakesale? And where oh where is Phil Collins in all of this?