The Great Live 8 Debate

It's official, again. People suck.

You give them free tickets to a concert for a good cause and they try to sell them on eBay for hundreds of dollars. You organize eight kick-ass shows around the world and they complain that the lineup is too white, too commercial, too whatever. You call attention to one of the modern world's deepest sources of shame --a continent pillaged for centuries, now left to fester -- and they criticize you for being negative. They accuse you of grandstanding, of heaving your aging rocker's carcass back into the spotlight for one last pitiful boogie with fame.

If I were Bob Geldof, I'd go live in a cave after all this Live 8 business is over with. July 7 would be a good day to leave. By then, the free concerts that Geldof organized in London, Cornwall, Philadelphia, Paris, Berlin, Rome, Johannesburg, Tokyo and Toronto will be over. The Long Walk to Justice will have come to an end, culminating in hordes of people arriving on July 6 in Edinburgh, 20 miles from Gleneagles, where the leaders of the eight richest countries in the world are gathered for their annual summit July 6-8. The strains of Dido and Travis will have died out in Edinburgh's Murrayfield Stadium. The headaches will be over. Geldof can listen to results of the G-8 summit, the impetus for it all, on the transistor radio in his cave, absently finger-combing his unruly, sexy-old-rocker locks.

But Sir Bob, knighted in 1985 for his work fighting African poverty, is undoubtedly too tough, egotistical and committed for that, so he'll probably hang around for the end of the G-8 (which gathers the presidents of Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia and the United States) before going on back home to London. There, he'll most likely continue doing the kind of work that got him named, alongside Tanzanian President Benjamin Mkapa and Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, to British Prime Minister Tony Blair's seventeen-member Commission for Africa.

That's where the real work has been done; Live 8 is just unofficial publicity for it. The Commission's work has driven Blair's agenda of debt forgiveness, increased aid and better trade terms for Africa, with impressive success so far: the G-8 nations have agreed to write off all $40 billion of debt for Africa's poorest 14 nations and four others in Latin America. In response to the Commission's recommendation to double current aid to sub-Saharan Africa to $50 billion by 2010, Europe has agreed to raise its foreign aid spending to .7 percent of GNP, though Washington stubbornly refuses to budge from the .15 percent range.

People like to sneer at rock stars like Geldof and Bono, another crusader for Africa, as dilettantes whose egos have deluded them into thinking they are political forces to be reckoned with. In recent weeks, Geldof's been accused of hubris and megalomania by British politicians, of all people, for inviting Nelson Mandela and the Pope to the concerts. British commentator Peter Hitchens wrote in the Mail that it was in fact Africa's starving children who were rescuing the "sagging reputations" of "balding, clapped-out rock stars." Spiked Online's Mick Hume calls the whole thing "every bit as paternalistic as the old imperialist attitudes."

But from here, it looks like Geldof has rung the bell, musically and politically.

Musically, the nine shows scheduled for July 2 add up to an astounding lineup: the Sex Pistols, Coldplay, Madonna, Scissor Sisters, U2, Green Day, Roxy Music, REM, Stevie Wonder, Brian Wilson, A-ha, The Cure, P. Diddy and Youssou N'Dour are just a few of the luminaries. There were immediate complaints that it was too white an event -- the United Kingdom's Black Information Link called it "hideously white" -- and the fact that most of the big-name African bands are relegated to Cornwall does in fact seem random. Live 8 organizers responded that the goal was simply to get as many big-name stadium-filling acts onstage as possible.