While Rome Burns
9 July 2007 by jaksoul
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.
9 July 2007, on 11:16 am
amen.
i’ve never seen such a flaccid display of so called activism. media sniping about fuel miles used to get to the gig aside it was the most directionless and inane piece of edu-tainment i’ve had the misfortune to place even a grain of hope in.
and most sadly, a wasted, wasted opportunity.
while the painful irony of the assembled new-wembley hoards, lighters aloft burning fossil fuels for a torch song was denied us by the smoking ban and failure to place the scorpions on the bill it wouldn’t have surprised me.
corporate social responsibility is admirable but the emphasis must be on the responsibility not the corpus. in that huge body of a (global) audience all that was simply required was the call for one person to make a change at a time but in the midst of it, i couldn’t find anything there to latch on to, and i care about the issues already. there was no target, no aim, just a scattergun of images of melting icecaps and rising sea levels, stuff which feels too huge to affect absorbed in the feedback of a three song hits set by your favourite artists.
following the unexpected potentcy and maniacly urgency of liveaid 21 years ago these events have been more about the jfk/do you remember where were you when..? factor rather than the issues at hand - with jonathon ross on a mauve sofa apologising for foul language and commentary on how nice low-energy lightbulbs are by graham norton.
the point has been sadly lost in a sordid falsity that a squall of loud guitars is the herald of social change. it ain’t, the miasma of entertainment alone as acitivism is something we need to address.
its dancing to the wrong beat.
13 July 2007, on 5:22 pm
“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.”
Who’s ‘we’ Kimosabi?
Later this Summer (14th to 21st of August), London is going to be hosting the UK’s biggest ever, grassroots, self-organised response to the threat of climate change, in the form of the second annual Climate Camp, from the 14th to the 21st of August… Combining three strands of workshops and popular education, a practical example of sustainable living and low-carbon alternatives, and days of kick up the arse of direct action to disrupt Heathrow as much as possible and draw attention to the fastest growing source of emissions.. the aviation industry.
All self-organised by people coming together because they are tired of the corporate appropriation of the climate change discourse in the form of bloated, irrelevant spectacles like Live Earth and the pseudo solutions being feebly peddled by ineffective governments.
I can’t exhort people enough to get themselves down there.. it is going to be incredibly inspiring, empowering, and effective… pretty much everything that Live-Earth wasn’t. Don’t waste energy moaning about the crappiness of Live Earth, come down and do something real and meaningful about climate change instead.
Check out the website.. http://www.climatecamp.org.uk I especially recommend checking out the fanstastically designed flyers.. the first ones ont he page:
http://www.climatecamp.org.uk/resources.php
that are designed to look like air safety manuals…
Finally, in terms of Live-Earth bashing (a favourite hobby of mine) and as a bit of a self-plug.. there’s a report put out by the collective I’m part of, Carbon Trade Watch, called “The Carbon Neutral Myth - Offset Indulgences for your Climate Sins” with a chapter on the hazards of gormless celebrities high-jacking and sound-biting the issue of climate change. You can download it for free from http://www.carbontradewatch.org.
Rant over.