The African Queen

On September 19, the editorial page of The New York Times lost its mind. Like many publications that once believed that seriousness is a sufficient sell (and in any event a sufficient calling), the paper has for some time now been whoring after the young. In its quest for "the 18-34 demographic, " which the paper seems to regard as just a sea of human iPods, all kinds of hip laxities have been committed, and these, combined with its new institutions of "transparency," have made the paper much less formidable and much too friendly. It is not the job of The New York Times to gladden and stroke and confide and affirm. But on September 19, as part of a perfectly admirable campaign to arouse the consciences of its readers about the emergency known as Africa, the editorial page directed them to MTV, to something called "The Diary of Angelina Jolie and Dr. Jeffrey Sachs in Africa." In an editorial vivaciously titled "Angelina and Jeff's Excellent Ideas," the most powerful editorial writers in the world lauded Jolie for "get[ting] down and dirty with a hoe," and concluded that "Ms. Jolie is dead right when she says that putting money into village-level programs could do much to alleviate poverty."When she says? I mean no condescension when I say that the attribution of theories of development to Angelina Jolie is almost certainly a mistake. (The same may be said of many politicians, who also retain the services of specialized minds.) This is not her field. So did she dine with the editorialists, or was the suggestion of dinner enough? The machinery of celebrity righteousness is a familiar thing, and its manipulations are easy to spot. In The Washington Post the other day, there appeared a photograph of Jolie and some very distinguished American suits at a Capitol Hill panel on hiv/ aids. The statesmen are grinning idiotically, helpless before the pulchritude. The issues of life and death notwithstanding, they appear to have been returned to their adolescence. This is so much cooler than Brian Urquhart at the Harold Pratt House! Or as yet another wet piece in the Times put it, Jolie's "lesson" seems "as broad and obvious as her celebrated lips." If you like those sorts of lips. I have been watching the emergence of Angelina Jolie as a historical figure with a deepening grumpiness. Not since the 1960s have so many entertainers believed that they can rescue the world. The Times also pointed emphatically to the energetic activism of Michael Douglas. "It was Michael Douglas, after all," wrote a reporter in Sunday Styles, "who stood behind the lectern at United Nations headquarters on Wednesday calling attention to an International Day of Peace that might otherwise have been overlooked." Otherwise? Douglas also boasted that "he had discussed arms sales and weapons of mass destruction with the presidents of Austria, Thailand, and a half-dozen African countries." My own admittedly perfunctory inquiries into the security policies of some of these states indicate that those discussions appear to have been inconsequential. The internecine savagery of the Palestinians has proved similarly immune to the charisma of Richard Gere. No, there is no real harm done. Celebrities are also citizens, and they have the right, and the duty, to act on their convictions. They can raise money and they can raise consciousness. But I have a suspicion that they corrupt the consciousnesses that they raise, because they confirm them in their belief in the moral authority of fame. With the exception of the cognitive habits of a Googling nation, nothing more disfigures personal authenticity in America than the veneration of celebrities. This is America's polytheism. It teaches Americans to live vicariously, passively, alienated from the possibilities of their own lives, in slavish imitation of people luckier than themselves. (Celebrity is in almost all cases a matter of luck.) One of the nice things about crimes against humanity, if you will pardon the expression, is that they seemed to be beyond the reach of the fabulous people, too shatteringly true to be absorbed into such a system of illusion; but no more. It was the glamour of Brad Pitt that led Diane Sawyer to the squalor of Ethiopia, where sick and starving children were transformed into the accessories of a reputation. (Pitt was opening a movie around the time of his humanitarian adventure.) There is the view, of course, that at least the star brought the children into prime time, and star-fucking in the service of good cannot be bad, right? Perhaps; but this was not publicity about human suffering, it was publicity about the publicity about human suffering. It was promotion disguised as compassion. Watching the diary of Brad Pitt and Diane Sawyer in Africa, it was hard to shake the feeling that you were being played. So let us see how often and how long the herd of icons stays with the story. I expect that the story will soon come to seem very 2005. One of the most discouraging things that we have learned from the coverage of contemporary atrocities is that the truth will set nobody free. I mean the truth alone, unbacked by power, unfortified by politics. The Bosnian genocide was in America's living rooms for years before the American president lifted a finger. There is not a thinking or a television-watching American who is not cognizant of the horrors of Darfur, but the horrors go on. The problem with the humanitarianism of the entertainers is that it perpetuates a confusion of politics with culture. Africa is dying not only for a want of foreign money and foreign awareness; it is dying also, or mainly, for a want of political will-- in the larcenous and incompetent governments of the African states, and in the wealthy and complacent governments of the West. A concert is not an act of politics, and neither is a conversation with Katie Couric. But a conversation with Tony Blair or Condoleezza Rice? I cannot tell to what extent Bono is different. Whether or not he is, as the star-struck Times reported, "a kind of one-man state," there is plainly nothing opportunistic about him, and he does stand out for his interest in policy and its instruments. "0.7 percent of GNP by 2015" is a considerable improvement on "make love, not war." Still, evil is bigger even than show business. I imagine that every aid worker understands this. And I remember a remark attributed to the doomed and golden Phil Ochs, who was asked, not long before he hanged himself in 1976, for his judgment of the efficacy of the counterculture: "They won the war, but we had the best songs."

By leon wieseltier