Twinkle, Twinkle
I’m beginning to think that I’m the milblogger who reads academic studies so that you don’t have to.
Well, at least I tie them into a larger discussion about foreign policy and war. Today’s homework was particularly cloying so I hope you appreciate it!
I say this because I digested, much as the python would a particularly talkative toad, “The Gender Politics of Celebrity Humanitarianism in Africa,” 17 pages of particularly opaque jargon-pocked scribble by Finland’s Jemima Repo and Riina Yrjola in the International Feminist Journal of Politics.
Perhaps because many moons ago I was indentured as a graduate student in literature, studying French and American post-structuralist theorists, I can translate an essay that in lieu of comprehension substitutes phrases such as “Foucauldian discourse-theoretical analysis” and “frames blurred differentiating western binaries by advocating contact instead of contrast and experience as opposed to exploitation.”
So, you’re welcome. I also do POMO weddings and bar mitzvahs.
Did I mention that contractors are carving up my house (and checkbook) while I’m doing this? Nothing like the song of the power saw along with academia’s mish-mashery of invented nouns.
First, however, let me tell you what this work says, and then we’ll talk about what it might mean, both for how our nation muddles through foreign policy and wages war in the 21st century.
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For their study, Repo and Yrjola (I can’t figure out the umlaut gadget, but Yrjola needs them above the “o” and “a”) read eight years (!) worth of articles about celebrity humanitarians in America’s New York Times and Time, plus Britain’s The Daily Telegraph and the BBC’s online journalism.
Their quarry to excavate: How western pop culture constructs the legitimacy necessary for U-2’s Bono, fellow Irishman Bob Geldof and Angelina Jolie to move as important “humanitarian actors” on the world political stage, especially when confronting the vast landmass we call “Africa.”
This isn’t a new topic. For more than a decade, researchers have been asking hard questions like these:
Are celebrities qualified political actors or not? Do their campaigns, like Live Aid and Product Red, do more harm than good? Are their efforts sincere or are they merely seeking positive publicity by plunging into philanthropic fads?
Repo and Yrjola nod to those earlier studies and then ask tougher questions about how and why we cede to a select few celebrity pop stars the manufactured authenticity they need in order to speak about and for a continent as diverse in its peoples as Africa.
Typically, the vaguely neutered famous white men invest themselves in the scrum of politics, haggling over debt relief and other similar issues with top government officials, bankers and philanthropists in the west; the ladies become better known “for engagement with children and women in areas of crisis.”
Male pop stars, it seems, come from a very rational, broad-shouldered sort of Hollywood Mars and Women are from a loving, maternal Venus. But these roles actually fall into much older myths ginned up during an era of western colonialism, ones that saw do– gooders championing “the enlightened world in their crusades against barbarism.”
Then as now, these crusades can only work if we prop up “Africa” as “a helpless passive victim or a dangerous and chaotic viral ground” and treat the continent “as a child, dependent and naïve, requiring western care and guidance.”
And my tribe of stenographic reporters fellates the stars to the point that they become “anti-hegemonic heroes who act against western power elites by speaking the truth about Africa.” Which is to say, we write a lot of horsesh** about people we don’t know so that they can do things we don’t understand to people overseas we’ve never met and then feel pretty sanctimonious about it.
Often, however, this “truth” about Africa really says more about ourselves than it does the people who live there, projecting onto the “Dark Continent” all the vile curses and desires of our modernity for our celebrity humanitarians to eradicate or nurture, depending on the vice or virtue.
What seems to be their noble “aid and development agenda” could be just as imperialistic as those of the missionaries and their porters toting the “white man’s burden” into the bush a century ago.
To become an effective spokeswoman for this 21st century imperialism, Angelina Jolie had to transform herself. Well, let me restate that. She had to let the many media reconfigure her iconographic status as a slutty homewrecker into something quite different in order for her to gain the legitimacy necessary to be a do-gooder.
Gone is the sexually perverse and banana-brained “babe in a bodysuit” zillionaire who wore a vial of her husband’s blood around her neck. Hello the “mother-without-borders” hot sort of moonlighting “Mother Theresa” for the United Nations.
It probably helps that Jolie also has turned her family into something of an humanitarian project – adopting Third World orphans and giving birth to her first baby of Brad Pitt in Namibia, making the white child, well, African. Whether that really became an attempt to whiten Africa remains open to scholarly debate.
For the two jet-setting Irishmen – the “contemporary entrepreneurial superhero” Bono and the scruffy “wise man and seer” Geldof – the various western media must buy into a carefully constructed myth of Irish history, turning them into tabloid ambassadors of a revolutionary, post-colonialist capitalistic society that’s evolved into an economic tiger.
Geldof’s image therefore is cultivated as a shaggy, cursing, scolding, truth-telling in-your-face-prick who grew up in a rough and poor Ireland and now knows what’s best for Africa and is beyond reproach if you call him on this self-perpetuated legend.
So, also, Bono, who gave us this bombast six years ago:
I think it’s probably – if there is such a thing as folk memory a sense that our country had a famine in the middle of the 19th century that halved our population, that two million died and two million went off to become policemen and priests in New York. I think, also, it’s from a sense of having come out from under the hoof of colonialism and having recently turned around our economy. And this is the kind of good news from an Irishman that helps meeting with finance ministers in Africa.
All the tired tropes about Ireland and Africa are there – famine, fervid religiosity, disease, death, eviction, injustice, exploitation – but Dublin made “evolutionary progress” and now can lecture the world on how they might do so, too.
Pay no mind to the fact that Bono never lived through any famines or faced any real threat of death or exploitation as a multi-millionaire star.
He has achieved the role of a secular saint for a “folk” with a tortured history a bit more complex than he’ll ever note, and Celts one might add who aren’t exactly economic tigers today, having built their economy into a Ponzi scheme that makes Bernie Madoff look like a piker.
To put it mildly.
To make themselves into the proper pitchmen, Bono and Geldolf must use their Irishness to morph from whites into Europe’s blacks, with the resulting raceless, ahistorical, sexless, classless image becoming the “self-righteous basis of western humanitarianism,” per our Finns.
It helps the cause, I suppose, when world-citizen Bono appears before the cameras garbed as revolutionary Che Guevara but loudly pimping like a televangelist his humanitarian-branded Product Red widgets to western consumers, all in an effort to aid the “global losers by helping them turn themselves into winners,” investing in the westernizing “adventure” of Africa for the good of the Africans.
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In order to reveal how successful these stars are at garnering legitimacy and authenticity when it comes to the lording over discussions about Africa, the Finnish researchers must show how others failed spectacularly to do so.
Enter Madge. Madonna’s African adventure has been spent almost wholly in Malawi, the nation where her charity sought to help orphans and from where she adopted a 1-year-old David Banda in 2007.
Why was Madonna’s intervention in the life of an impoverished child so different from Jolie’s serial adoption program? Partly, perhaps, because Madonna mixed UNICEF fundraising with crass commercialism – asking for moolah while opening Gucci’s Manhattan flagship store. Partly because the pop star makes no bones about expressing sexual desire, aging with the adornment of couture and cosmetics and flaunting her wealth and success.
You know, the sort of woman who sends a private jet and then her chauffered Rolls Royce to ferry the poor little African to her mansion while some Malawians kvetch that rules were bent to greenlight the adoption and sideline the confused father, mechanic Yohane Banda, a man portrayed in the press as illiterate, uneducated and dull-witted in need of some aid from them, too.
Voila: “At best, Madonna was a self-indulgent superstar, at worst a slave trading babysnatcher,” as our Finns order it. They found no story that included an African voice other than Banda’s — a voice ‚mind you, that reporters and celebs alike “disparaged and explained away as too underdeveloped, too dependent and ignorant to know itself or its own good.”
The same media star-makers who transformed Bono into the cult of personality capitalist vamping a fake Irish history failed to limn whether Madge’s equally lower-class Detroit upbringing might be motivating her charity. The Finnish authors suggested that it was because Madonna hasn’t made the proper public show of expressing gratitude for her career while renouncing her sinful past.
So, her celebrity humanitarianism just ain’t as selflessly good as theirs.
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You obviously can detect the foreign policy dilemma created by invented celebrity humanitarians furthering neo-liberal economic policies that have consequences – some unintended and perhaps quite bad – for swarthy peoples maybe deserving of more in this life than western pity and “help.”
One also might suggest that some of the celebrity humanitarians’ Holy Grails (debt relief, increased free trade to Africa) are responses to earlier economic and social prescriptions visited upon benighted Africans, which were themselves solutions of sorts to problems created by even earlier generations of crusading do-gooder imperialists.
But then we would need to treat Jolie and her Irishmen with some irony, a rhetorical device to which their cultivated, mythological celebrity seems impervious.
I’ve perhaps had a bit more luck treating with a touch of my strychnine irony a different sort of mythological creature spun from the digital gossamer of modern media– the celebrity general and his coutiers.
The same cultural forces that construct Bono or Jolie as humanitarian pitchmen for larger western interests (bankers, soldiers, spies and their states) work their magic on today’s generation of “warrior-scholars,” the sorts of people who borrow from the same language and traffic in the same tropes purloined from the colonial era to sell their brand of huggy-wuggy warmaking designed “not just to dominate land operations, but to change entire societies.”
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If you don’t recognize that spookily horsesh** homily, one that could’ve been cribbed from many of the more optimistic missionaries a century ago, it’s from Dr John Nagl — formerly U.S. Army LTC John Nagl — a brainy and smiling macher in the appropriate DC power tie who helms the Center for A New American Security think tank. The job is sorta on loan while liberal hawk co-founders Michelle Flournoy and Kurt Campbell toil diligently on behalf of President Barack Obama to direct, respectively, the policy shack in the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the remnants of American power in the Pacific.
It perhaps gives Nagl plenty of time to spend with one of those celebrity journalists who serve as faithful fluffers to this generation of celebrity generals, Tom Ricks.
You know, the celebrity generals like David Petraeus – the best salesman for a kinder, gentler counter-guerrilla campaign, COIN, they could find.
Now, most sane people would think of counter-insurgency campaigns overseas as the nasty sort of warfighting one must conduct to bludgeon a recalcitrant people into submission, but not our celebrity “warrior-scholars,”their celebrity stenographers and the think tank wonks who feed them quotes and gossip to scaffold the myth of humanitarian warfare they hope to wage against peoples who rather they’d leave.
Just as we need Jolie and Bono to pimp interventionist financial and social policies for Africans, so we need to parse the brutish bloodletting of COIN into something noble and therefore sufficiently legitimate, and we do that by turning Iraqis and Afghans into the dull, crazy, violent, uneducated, diseased, poor and luckless churls other celebs use to define “Africa.”
And those who are selling the top-down service of “changing whole societies” into something that resembles ours must also be transformed into famously smart, deeply committed humanitarians at ease with jet-setting agenda setters, diplomats, bankers and politicians.
Petraeus, for example, isn’t merely a competent officer born of the middle class and promoted through the ranks of our military bureaucracy to lead much like all other generals. In order for you to swallow investing a trillion dollars and thousands of American lives in overseas adventures of dubious benefit to U.S. power he must become something authentically yummy to global elites and celebrity-addled journos alike.
So that’s how the boy from sleepy Cornwall-on-Hudson morphs into the pan-European sophisticate born to a Dutch skipper, just as the Australian David Kilcullen has become a world citizen as comfortable in DC as he is Canberra, Kabul and Karbala.
Same thing, really.
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This process isn’t merely that of manufacturing an icon. It’s an act of willful forgetting.
Just as cameras today forget to record Jolie’s nannies lurking in the background of photo shoots or the tattoos still lining her hide, for example, we must elide the fact that Petraeus married the daughter of his general boss at West Point, perhaps the smartest career move he ever made.
We peform this disappearing act by prattling instead about how uber-smart Petraeus is (Princeton!) and reminding audiences iteratively that he loves to do push-ups and will perform the ritual for any reporter who arrives for the matinee. We overlook questions of race, gender, religion, politics with Petraeus so that we might portray him as a gush-golly high achieving sophisticate equally at ease riding a tank into battle as he is teaching ruddy peoples how to behave in a civilized manner.
Our celebrity-obsessed culture therefore gladly assigns Petraeus the titles of “warrior” — despite him never encountering war until he was well advanced into middle age — and “scholar” for FM 3–24, a grasping manual really written by others and which hasn’t exactly informed the wars we’ve fought.
We extol his virtues of softly “winning hearts and minds” of people once at war with us while denigrating the vices of knuckle-draggers who “don’t get it” as they blast apart some of the same Taliban or JAM organs to achieve battlefield results perhaps a bit more persuasive to the souls in rebellion.
Petraeus, you see, is a “builder” whereas those dull-witted gunmen who replaced him in Mosul, Baghdad and Bagram are despicable “occupiers,” a distinction perhaps lost on Iraqis or Afghans but what do they know?
If Iraqis and Afghans were so great we’d be doting on their celebrities, damn it. Let them build their own myths while we rebuild their nation. Or the terrorists win.
Ultimately, you see, it doesn’t really matter how much of “Petraeus” was manufactured by the media and how much arrived from the DNA of an earnest Dutch skipper. If the saintly and competent man we call “Petraeus” didn’t exist our culture would need to invent him.
Only such a creature as this media-minted “Petraeus” could have the requisite legitimacy to serve as the warrior-scholar prophet of our post-colonial, neo-liberal agenda-setting gospel against terrorists.
So I ask you, gentle reader, when it comes to manufacturing policy, what’s really the difference between a celebrity general like Petraeus and celebrity socialite Angelina Jolie?
He or his disciples probably have appeared more often in the columns of Tom Friedman or on Charlie Rose’s soundstage, whereas she’s more likely to greet us in People and Inside Hollywood, I suppose.
But it probably really comes down to blood.
The starlet no longer hangs it from her throat.
And reporters have washed it all from the general’s hands.
At our vast electronic sink, he didn’t even have to ask for a towel. But he might’ve had to do a few push-ups before they’d twist the faucet to full blast.
Tags: Afghanistan, Africa, Angelina Jolie, Bono, celebrity humanitarians, Coin, David Petraeus, Iraq, Ireland
