Fellow Celebrity Who Gives a Damn: George Clooney
These celebrity profiles are short and sweet, intended only to highlight that celebrity does, indeed, lend itself to educating the public and drawing media attention to the plights of those who collective voices, however many millions in total and however infused with horrific suffering, are drowned out by the aimless meanderings of empty socialites. One by one, I’m picking my way through fellow celebs who actually do seem to give a damn.
Who gives a damn? George Clooney gives a damn.
Clooney on the Iraq war: “You can’t beat your enemy anymore through wars; instead you create an entire generation of people revenge-seeking. These days it only matters who’s in charge. Right now that’s us — for a while at least. Our opponents resort to car bombs and suicide attacks because they have no other way to win. I believe (Rumsfeld) thinks this is a war that can be won, but there is no such thing anymore. We can’t beat anyone anymore.”
Most significantly, Clooney is active in advocating a resolution of the Darfur conflict. His efforts to raise awareness about the ongoing misery include an episode of Oprah, speaking at the Save Darfur rally in Washington, D.C., and interview after interview on the subject. He has also traveled to the region for first-hand information gathering.
Clooney had this to say about the Darfur genocide: “The news is that two years after we’ve said “genocide” that it’s still going on and it’s increasing — and that somewhere in there we can all talk about this and make speeches and say this is horrible and we have to do something. But every day we don’t do something, and every day this goes on, thousands of people are dying and dying horrific deaths. Samantha Power wrote a piece where she met with a woman who was running as they were coming into camp. And she [the woman] was holding two of her kids and her son following her, and they shot her son in the back, who’s six. And she ran up in the hills with her two daughters. And they came back, and they have stuffed the well full of parts of all the citizens of this little village, including her son. They poison the wells in every town they go into. They don’t want the land. They just want to [ethnically] cleanse everyone. The unfortunate truth of it is it’s not somehow sexy enough news and it’s hard. It’s hard to look at, and after a while people don’t want to see it. And there’s a lot of, I think, wear and tear on people seeing a lot of tragedy. But while we don’t pay attention to it and sort of shut our eyes, there’s an awful lot of killing going on, an awful lot of rape going on. Here’s the thing: We always see this now. We have tragedy fatigue on television. Every day, 20 kids [are] killed in Iraq or, you know, there’s always disaster. Pakistan, Afghanistan, there’s always horrible disaster in Nepal now. But this is genocide, and if everybody just got up right now out of their chair and picked up a phone and called their congressman, or called the number that registered with the president, it makes a difference. It always has.â€
An aside: Can we get some armed NATO troops in there already? No? Fine, let’s start a fund to hire Croatian mercenaries to protect these people. Hell, Charlton Heston can round up a group of neo-Rough Riders in a heartbeat. Stop already with the geopolitical excuses, the religious obstacles and the myriad other excuses offered by handwringers who don’t really give a damn about human lives. FIRST, we save lives and end suffering. THEN, we worry about the potential political fallout. It’s very simple – we either put love and respect for each other above politics and religion, or we don’t. If we don’t, we’re sub-human and deserve this planet not a whit. The imbeciles in governments around the world think they have it all worked out, think they know how to manipulate world events, that they can predict the results of global (in)actions, yet they’re no better equipped, in terms of basic intellectual prowess, than you, nor I, nor a factory worker in Macau. What they believe, erroneously, is that they are privy to information that separates them, elevates them, and positions them in such a way as to make their insight more accurate, more helpful, more invaluable to humanity and the world. The reality ism the only elevation that has taken place is the separation, up and away, of their soul from their intellect. Having one without the other renders a person far less capable of acting as a steward or leader than the simplest child. So, am I saying that a group of children would handle the Darfur disaster better, more humanely, than our current crop of world leaders? Yes, I’m saying exactly that.
++
The most significant book you’ve read or I will buy it back from you at full purchase price: Lester Brown’s Plan B 2.0 Trust me on this one, just order it. You’ll thank me later.
Can we get some armed NATO troops in there already? No? Fine, let’s start a fund to hire Croatian mercenaries to protect these people. Hell, Charlton Heston can round up a group of neo-Rough Riders in a heartbeat. Stop already with the geopolitical excuses, the religious obstacles and the myriad other excuses offered by handwringers who don’t really give a damn about human lives. FIRST, we save lives and end suffering. THEN, we worry about the potential political fallout. It’s very simple – we either put love and respect for each other above politics and religion, or we don’t.
That’s a nice sentiment, and easy enough to support outside of our cultural and political context. However, just exactly this sort of “humanitarian” reasoning was part of what took us into Iraq. The role of globocop is a very, very slippery slope, and we as a nation have not done a very good job with it historically. Given the outstanding lack of judgement displayed by our leadership (and I’m not just talking about W. in this case), I’m not sure that the moral consequences of getting involved in someone else’s fight are preferable to the moral weight of sitting on the sidelines and letting them sort it out.
And, of course, there is oil there. Which complicates things and practically ensures that any action we take there will wind up being twisted to serve powerful special interests rather than the needs of the indigenous people. What’s happening there is a tragedy, beyond a doubt, but one hopes that we haven’t already forgotten the lesson of how easy it is for us to take a bad situation and make it much, much worse.
I totally understand your perspective, and on every logical level it rings very true and solid. Of course we have to include the clutural and political context. YET . . .YET . . . on a fundamental humanitarian level it just doesn’t work. Or at the very least, we must incorporate these two facets into the decision making, but not use them as our exclusive parameters. Agreed, we typically make bad situations worse through intervention and when we do get involved it’s too little, too late (Milosevic). Clearly, our world organizations/bodies/institutions/governments have skewed motivators. Perhaps Jimmy Carter should take over, hand in hand with the Dalai Lama? Okay, I’m joking and I can’t say I’m a huge Carter fan, but what would the Dalai Lama, for example, say about this situation? Better yet, what has he said? Oh wait, here’s what he said, in somewhat stilted English:
“The United Nations are a structure, it’s a political sort of authority, they are representatives of the governments, so then unfortunately behind the scenes they are always making tricks. I think some kind of corruption of the highest level … and the poor people suffer, look at Africa, Darfur.”
I get the drift, though. He’s saying “The UN is a fucking mess and needs to put people first, not politics. Until it does so, the poorest people will continue to be butchered mercilessly.”
Now, what is the utopian ideal? Hell if I know. But I’m an unabashed idealist. We may be the same bloody savage species that we were in the midst of the Crusades (I don’t believe in the dawning of the Age of Aquarius - we’ve changed zero, in terms of evolutionary or spiritual function over the past centuries), but we’re better organized and better educated (overall, perhaps, at least I hope so) and have more resources with which to do great good.
The role of globocop is easily filled, by the way. Last time I checked, Peter Weller is still alive and well (who better than the man who gave life to both Robocop AND Buckaroo Banzai?).