"If you want to save the planet, I want you to start jumping up and down.
Come on, m------------!" Madonna railed from the stage at London's Live
Earth concert Saturday. "If you want to save the planet, let me see you
jump!"
You just can't beat that. What else could capture the canned juvenilia of a
48-year-old centimillionaire - who owns nine homes and has a "carbon
footprint" nearly 100 times larger than the norm - hectoring a bunch of
well-off aging hipsters to show their Earth-love by jumping up and down like
children?
But, hey, I don't want to bash Live Earth, which is not to be confused with
Live Aid (1985, dedicated to eradicating African famine) or Live 8 (2005,
promising to relieve African nations' debts). So with the African continent
so well-fed - and debt-free! - who can blame the Celebrity Concern Industry
for moving on to its next big success?
The avowed point of Live Earth was to ... can you guess? That's right: raise
awareness about global warming. Considering the energy required to put on
the show, the nine Live Earth concerts doubtlessly raised more CO2 than
awareness. NBC's three-hour televised version got trounced by "Cops" and
"America's Funniest Home Videos." Moreover, surely most of the people who
attended or tuned in already knew about global warming before they saw the
video tutorial about Ed Begley Jr.'s eco-friendly home and
sanctimony-powered go-cart.
Still, if fans had somehow missed the global warming story entirely, imagine
how befuddled they must have felt while listening to Dave Matthews sing the
glories of cloth diapers. And, assuming they didn't hit the mute button when
Czech supermodel Petra Nemcova came to the stage, one wonders what any
climate-change ingenues might have made of her remarks. The model, who
nearly was killed in Thailand by the 2004 tsunami, explained that she
"didn't feel hate toward nature" because of the tsunami. "I felt nature was
screaming for help."
It's nice that Nemcova didn't want to blame the messenger, but it's hard to
feel a similar reluctance about Live Earth's impresario in chief. Former
Vice President Al Gore recently penned a book in which he rails against the
current "assault on reason" by the evil forces of Earth-hating
right-wingery. He repeatedly invokes science as if it's his exclusive
property. But the soft paganism on display in Nemcova's faith-based
assertion that a suboceanic earthquake was the result of Mother Nature
sending us a message is typical of greenhouse gasbaggery.
Gore talks about the dysfunction of political discourse today. But when it
comes to global warming, he and his acolytes insist that the time for debate
is over. In other words, Gore's ideal discourse would involve only
discussion about how best to follow through on his prescriptions. Continued... |