One day, perhaps living in the post-oil society predicted by prophets such as Matt Simmons or James Kunstler, we will look back at events like this weekend’s woeful LiveEarth concerts as a fitting epitaphs for a culture that was tragically incapable of engaging in the reality and responsibility of enacting actual change when the need for such measures was at it’s gravest.
It is hard to imagine a more feeble response to such dire threat; seeing the red hot chilli peppers perform, complete with Anthony Kiedis nonsensical nursery-rhyme lyrics, whilst random ‘animal kingdom visuals’ played on huge screens to billions of people I was reminded of something Eugene Peterson once wrote;
The entertainment industry in the West is second to none in providing cheap diversions and borrowed ecstasies. A temporary detachment from daily responsibilities, a vacation from demanding intimacies, is most useful-it can return us to our dailiness, our jobs and friends and families, energized and renewed….But in excess it defeats what it sets out to do for us: we are herded into the bleachers as spectators to the aliveness of life, reduced to the passivity of a couch potato, satiated into sloth.
Somewhere along the line we have lost our ability to engage with any kind of radical action and replaced it with the misplaced sense that it is enough to spectate.
And our artists are silent.
150 acts from all around the world not one with anything to say, not one able to provoke or inspire. Resorting instead to borrowing passion and radicalism from another era, diluted and scrubbed of all it’s edges by the passage of time.
If our best response to the ‘greatest threat mankind has ever known’ is Corinne Bailey Rae and John Legend covering ‘Mercy Mercy Me’, surely we deserve all that is coming.