Word: bonos
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...commitment acts as a catalyst. They needed the drug companies to come on board, and the major health agencies, the churches, the universities and a whole generation of politicians who were raised to believe that foreign aid was about as politically sexy as postal reform. And that is where Bono's campaign comes in. He goes to churches and talks of Christ and the lepers, citing exactly how many passages of Scripture ("2,103") deal with taking care of the poor; he sits in a corporate boardroom and talks about the role of aid in reviving the U.S. brand...
...Bono grasps that politicians don't much like being yelled at by activists who tell them no matter what they do, it's not enough. Bono knows it's never enough, but he also knows how to say so in a way that doesn't leave his audience feeling helpless. He invites everyone into the game, in a way that makes them think they are missing something if they hold back. "After so many years in Washington," says retired Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina, whom Bono recruited to his cause, "I had met enough well-known people to quickly...
Jolie is just a woman of her time. 2005 will go down as the year of charitainment. The networks broadcast celebrity telethons for both tsunami and Hurricane Katrina aid. Bono and Bob Geldof organized the Live 8 concerts with the help of screenwriter Richard Curtis (Love Actually), who wrote HBO's The Girl in the Café, the world's first romantic comedy about African debt relief. (As propaganda goes, it was at least a better date flick than Triumph of the Will.) Even celebrity cartoons were pressed into service. UNICEF blew the Smurfs into little blue smithereens for a commercial...
More interesting than why celebrities take up causes--and tougher to answer--is why the rest of us pay attention to them. Granted, there is the rare celeb, like Bono, who becomes a bona fide expert, but why should I turn to him for advice on solving poverty any more than I'd buy a ticket to watch global-poverty guru Jeffrey Sachs sing I Will Follow? Maybe stars can draw on a reservoir of trust, but that trust can be volatile. In 1985 Michael Jackson was a beloved humanitarian. Today, hearing him sing "We are the world/We...
...equivalent of throwing a dart at a map. A pretty face and a famous name are a convenient excuse to focus on one problem in the midst of a thousand equally unignorable others. To give to Tibet and not Africa may seem callous. But to pick Richard Gere over Bono--that's just show...