Canada and Other Matters of Opinion (5 page)

What happened?

I suppose the spectacle of the world’s most wasteful people, rock-star plutocrats with their cribs and bling, caravans of trailer trucks and 100,000-watt amplifiers, taking a day out of their wealth-stuffed lives to preach to the less well off of the world on the moral importance of consuming less “to save the planet” set the hypocrisy bar so high that it put too great a strain on the digestion of ordinary people. In the wicked words of one rock star who declined to climb aboard the bandwagon, “Private jets for climate change.”

Unless outfitted with a cast-iron stomach—and I mean a real one—how could anybody endure Madonna of the Nine Mansions wrapping herself in the ascetics of the ecomovement? Hyper-indulgent, super-pampered, colossally
wealthy, manically consumerist entertainment celebrities preaching restraint to others: Live Earth was a weird and monstrous journey to a whole new dimension of live irony. Come back, Uriah Heep. All is forgiven.

Not even the professional environmentalists could stay their gorge at Madonna’s participation. They gave the world the news that the Material Girl owns shares in the most politically incorrect enterprises, such as Alcoa, the American aluminum giant, the Ford Motor Company and Weyerhaeuser, which—gasp!—chops trees for money.

Then there was the sheer, deep folly of it all. What has Shakira, or her hips, got to offer on the question of the world’s weather over the next hundred years? But Shakira is Robert Oppenheimer on steroids compared with Geri Halliwell of the long-forgotten fluff band the Spice Girls—“Yo, I’ll tell you what I want, what I really, really want, etc., etc., etc., etc.”

Geri Halliwell, Snoop Dogg, Shakira, Madonna and the Pussycat arborists are an unlikely think tank (maybe a think tank top?) on global warming or anything else. They are career publicists of themselves, artists in the merchandising of fluff and ego.

But beyond the obvious hypocrisy, beyond the saccharine, Mickey Rooneyesque “let’s put on a show” conceit of the Live Earth dud-spectacular, I think something rather deeper and, perhaps grimly encouraging, accounts for its failure.

The public has just gotten tired of “stars.” These luminescent bodies are now in much the same leaky boat as
most politicians because, by trying to wed themselves to some aspects of politics to strengthen or underwrite their highly capitalist careers, they are seen as manipulative in precisely the same cynical way politicians are. Entertainers are, primarily, politicians of their own careers.

They don’t have the “cred” they used to have. They have been exposed as shills for themselves before anything else. And so it’s not the elephantine “carbon footprint” of Madonna or the big bands that turned people away from Live Earth. It’s the growing perception that all the strutting icons up there on all those stages are playing a game, just as the politicians play a game, and for very much the same self-serving, egoistic reasons.

It’s an
Animal Farm
moment for our time: “The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”

Now it’s impossible to say which are the stars and which are the politicians. Madonna and Gore—can you spot the difference?

Where is Cameron Diaz? Haven’t seen—and, worse, haven’t heard from—her in so long a while. Has she been disappeared? Is she in Guantanamo, the Bush-Cheney gulag for dissident celebrities?

A little more than four years ago, on a panel boasting the finest minds the world has known since the days of ancient Athens, when Socrates was tutoring Plato, Ms. Diaz
was offering advice on the coming election between George Bush and John Kerry.

The setting was the daily edification we all know and love as
The Oprah Winfrey Show
. The grand empath, her Oprahness, had designed a program to stir the youth of America to vote, and crowded onto the couch (besides Ms. Diaz) an almost frightening constellation of intelligence and prestige.

There was Sean Combs, a putty artist of nomenclature, whom you may know as Puff Daddy, P. Diddy, Puffy, Diddy, Daddy Piff or Diddy Puff. The backup intellects for the occasion, doo-woppers for Mr. Diddy’s famous Vote or Die campaign, were Christina Aguilera and Drew Barrymore.

Think of it as a symphony of mind.

It was the sylphlike Ms. Diaz who most lucidly framed the choice between George (Neanderthal, Halliburton, frat boy, Karl Rove puppet, tool of Big Oil, IQ of a lug wrench) Bush and John (elegant) Kerry. She issued a warning to the timid and vacant minds of young America, especially to the female half of that monstrous demographic: “If you think rape should be legal, then don’t vote!”

And lest that wouldn’t hold their attention—the young of America are notoriously detached—the delectable Cassandra who had transfixed the world in
There’s Something About Mary
further cautioned that they “could lose the right to their bodies.” Which would be inconvenient.

America didn’t listen that day—at least, young America didn’t. George (amoeba, cretin, theocrat, warmonger) Bush
defeated John (sweet) Kerry, rape has been legal in that despoiled country for four years, and millions of young women have had to get government permission to use their bodies for anything—getting out of bed, going to a global warming protest, dropping by Starbucks or attending the MTV Awards (where a body is an absolute must—although there’s a cover charge on the brain).

We haven’t heard from Ms. Diaz this cycle, which is such a shame. Maybe she’s just tired. Or taken up macramé. Speaking Bluetooth to power can drain the old soul. But America is nothing if not the country of renewal. If one oracle vanishes, another leaps from the self-help rack at Barnes and Noble, or from the back pages of the better fashion magazines.

The Cameron Diaz of the 2008 election—and, need I say, supporter of Barack (cool, mesmeric, “thrill up my leg,” hope, change, new dawn, better dawn, dawn all day) Obama is Erica Jong. Ms. Jong wrote a book called
Fear of Flying
, which is to literature what
Charlie’s Angels
is to theology.

But Ms. Jong is, make no mistake about it, a seer and guru of Diaz-like dimensions. She hangs about with an almost equally illustrious crowd, numbering such geopolitical high foreheads as Jane (Hanoi, exercise videos, Ted Turner) Fonda and Naomi (Al Gore’s “earth tones” clothing consultant, author of
The Treehouse
) Wolf as among her fellow thinkers.

Ms. Jong, and God bless her courage, issued a warning this week—via the Italian press, where the Apocalypse (not
surprisingly) has its own feature page—that should Barack Obama lose the election on Tuesday, “blood will run in the streets.” Fearful that that was a tad ambiguous, she—this was the novelist in her breaking out—referenced America’s founding trauma.

“If Obama loses, it will spark the second American Civil War.” There you have it. Vote for Barack Obama, or Gettysburg will have a sequel, and poor Ken Burns will have to do that damn series all over again. The stakes are high. You betcha. (And, oh yes, Jane Fonda’s having “back pains” just thinking about this. Which probably means she should stop thinking with her back, but I digress.)

Well, we all know what happened when America ignored Cameron Diaz four years ago. Global warming, Katrina, stock-market meltdown and, of course, that rape thing. The question is, will Americans similarly ignore the prescience of the artist who gave the world the concept of a “zipless fuck”?

I cannot think it will. America will not a second time be heedless. There will not be blood on the streets. No second Civil War. And America, and Barack Obama, will have no one to thank for it but Erica Jong, and the immortal slogan: Save Jane’s Back—Vote Obama. Intellect will out: John McCain and Sarah Palin are toast.

In my books, this is right up there with Cameron Diaz. Sigh.

The casual understanding of what is being called the cartoon crisis is fairly straightforward. A Danish newspaper published twelve cartoons that depicted the Prophet Mohammed. Two in particular stood out: one featured the Prophet wearing a “bomb” turban, the other featured him on a cloud meeting three suicide bombers arriving (we presume) in Paradise with the line, “Stop, stop, we ran out of virgins!”

The cartoons, measured by a secular, Western yardstick, were not exceptional. A few were mere stylized representations. The pictures were not ferocious caricatures—compared with the ferocious U.K. Cartoon of the Year of Ariel Sharon eating Palestinian babies, they were timid and innocuous.

By the standards of a moderate religious sensibility, they were irreverent. By the standards of Muslim sensibility, they were beyond question blasphemous and insulting. The cartoons’ blasphemy does not hang on what many are
calling the absolute prohibition against any picturing of the Prophet. The question of whether the Prophet may be represented in images or art is, I gather, not as determinatively settled as a lot of news accounts casually suggest. They are blasphemous because in Islam, as in fact in many or all the world’s main religions, mocking, deriding or disrespectfully or perversely invoking the deity is a definition of blasphemy.

Portions of the West may have forgotten what blasphemy is. The entertainment industry, with reference to Christianity in particular, seems never to have either known or cared. A picture of Kanye West wearing a crown of thorns, on the cover of
Rolling Stone
, is a blasphemy. The infamously celebrated
Piss Christ
—a crucifix in a jar of urine—is blasphemous even to my lapsed sensibility. And, of course, there’s Madonna’s career.

The Danish cartoons were published in September 2005 in Denmark, but the uproar over them—the simultaneous protests, riots and embassy-burnings they are said to have sparked—only reached a peak now, five months later. Most people reading the news may have wondered why there was such a gap between the publication and the outrage. And why, amid so many other quarrels between the West and the Muslim world, these twelve cartoons were capable of stirring such violent passions.

Part of the answer, and it seems to me an important point to underscore, is that it is not just the original twelve cartoons, but at least three others—all more offensive than
any of the originals. One shows the Prophet with a pig’s snout, one features bestiality, another pedophilia.

These three were included in a “dossier” compiled by an imam in Denmark who took a tour of Muslim countries, showing them to state and religious leaders. Since that tour, he has been interviewed on Danish television about the additions, and one of the more insulting images has been shown to have been doctored.

We are not free to subtract this element from an account of the outrage. If there has been manipulation in the Muslim world of this story, and additionally, if more corrosive images have been deliberately added to the originals, corrosive images designed by their greater graphic and scatological detail to make outrage all but inescapable, then it is not just a story about twelve cartoons about Mohammed published in a Danish newspaper. It may be a bigger story about quite cynical and duplicitous manipulation, founded on a kernel of reality, then amplified with more explosive material and fed into the context of suspicion, friction and misunderstanding between the West and the Muslim world.