Normally, we at PopPolitics don’t like to feed the beast. The obsession with scantily-clad celebrities reflects a lowest common denominator approach to pop culture.

But having said that, we can’t resist beginning a post on the complications and contradictions of today’s Live Earth concerts with an image from the front page of Boston.com, Boston Globe’s website.

Yes, as the caption indicates, that’s Shakira doing her best to combat global warming (click on the image to see it in a broader context on the page).

Putting the visual irony aside, the image is very revealing (darn — couldn’t help myself). As Ben Sisario of The New York Times points out, the balance that Live Earth organizers are trying to strike between style and substance is somewhere between difficult and impossible:

Live Earth has already been hit by a predictable series of analytical arrows. Environmental bloggers questioned the need for big, energy-gorging concerts. News reports pointed out that performers would be making trips around the world in exhaust-spewing jets, and that some of them (Kanye West, Sheryl Crow) have songs in S.U.V. commercials.

And the ratio of political effectiveness to celebrity glitz is not always clear. Reebee Garofalo, a professor of media and technology at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, who has written about music?s role in mass movements, noted that many big charity events, like the concerts for Nelson Mandela, had tangible success; Mr. Mandela himself acknowledged the importance of music to the worldwide anti-apartheid movement.

But the event itself will fundamentally be about entertainment. “The people going are going to hear the music,” Professor Garofalo said. “So the question then becomes: How do you use that event to promote the growth and expansion of a political movement that involves collective action?”

Meanwhile, The Daily Mail in the UK produces some hard numbers about the carbon footprint of the Live Earth concerts — as well as recent tours of Live Earth artists.

Starting with American-turned-Londoner Madonna, who is performing at Wembley Stadium today, the article lays out a fairly devastating case against today’s spectacle:

For her 2006 World Tour, she flew by private jet, transporting a team of up to 100 technicians and dancers around the globe. Waiting in the garage at home, she has a Mercedes Maybach, two Range Rovers, an Audi A8 and a Mini Cooper S.

Indeed, Madonna’s carbon footprint is dwarfed only by her ego - she has vowed that she will ’speak to the planet’ at Wembley. In fact, an apology might be in order - for the superstar’s energy consumption is only the tip of the iceberg in this epic vanity-fest.

The Live Earth event is, in the words of one commentator: “a massive, hypocritical fraud”.

For while the organisers’ commitment to save the planet is genuine, the very process of putting on such a vast event, with more than 150 performers jetting around the world to appear in concerts from Tokyo to Hamburg, is surely an exercise in hypocrisy on a grand scale.

Matt Bellamy, front man of the rock band Muse, has dubbed it ‘private jets for climate change’.

A Daily Mail investigation has revealed that far from saving the planet, the extravaganza will generate a huge fuel bill, acres of garbage, thousands of tonnes of carbon emissions, and a mileage total equal to the movement of an army.

In my mind, an even bigger problem than the potential hypocrisy of the event is the focus on individual action to fight climate change and other environmental crises. Too often the message taken from an event like Live Earth is that if we all just recycle more, we can save the planet.

But, of course, it’s the corporate and governmental sources of pollution that really matter — and those only change through institutions, not individuals.

To their credit, organizers of the event like Al Gore and Kevin Wall continually assert that their goal is to use individual awareness to foster larger change. Gore told The New York Times that he wants to “create a critical mass of opinion worldwide that will push the world across a tipping point beyond which political and business and civic leaders across the spectrum will begin offering genuinely meaningful solutions to the climate crisis. I think that?s a realistic hope, and it?s greatly needed.”

We’re hoping he’s right.

Plus: Yinka Adegoke of Reuters discusses how the Live Earth is harnessing the power of the web in unprecedented ways.

Michael Casey’s AP story on the filming of “Aftermath” — the upcoming HBO/BBC mini-series about the 2004 tsumani — begins with this anecdote:

Initially, Boonlue Mongkhol objected to his village being used for a TV miniseries about the 2004 tsunami. He lost his loved ones in the disaster and didn’t want to relive the tragedy.

But when the British Broadcasting Corp. advertised for extras, the 38-year-old businessman put aside his personal feelings and spent five days portraying a corpse and a body collector ? earning $13 a day.

“My father, niece and nephew died there,” said Boonlue, who also lost his house, seafood restaurant and mini market when the massive waves hit Khao Lak on Dec. 26, 2004. “I didn’t want to do it but there is no other way to earn money.”

Your family just died — wanna play a corpse? This certainly takes the ethical debate over post-traumatic filmmaking to another level.

Other controversial moves — besides putting up fliers encouraging victims to become extras — included filming on a main road that was devastated by the giant waves.

The article is well worth reading. The producer certainly defends herself. It’s time the debate entered the broader cultural conversation, though.

“You are what you eat” has long been the mantra of parents and health professionals who are trying to reach, in the most simplistic terms, a reluctant audience, be they teenagers or their out-of-shape elders. In an increasingly interconnected world, though, the message is incomplete.

A community, a nation, a world is also what it consumes.

And maybe that broader message — which takes the question of eating out of the realm of personal decision-making and moves it into a larger political and environmental context — will resonate where the old mantra has failed.

At least that’s the hope of author Michael Pollan, who now holds the yet-to-be-codified position of what I can only call something like “food contextualizer” at the New York Times. A contributor in the past to The New York Times Magazine, Pollan now writes a blog/column for the online edition of the Times (although it’s part of the TimesSelect subscription-only service). In one of his inaugural columns about long-standing biases against food journalism, he lays out the territory (quite literally):

?When we try to pick out anything by itself,? John Muir once wrote, ?we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.? Some of these things are better hitched than others, and food is surely one of them. We don?t ordinarily think about it this way, but eating represents our most powerful engagement with the natural world ? it transforms the world by remaking the landscape more than any other human activity, and it transforms, and defines, us. Whenever a biologist wants to understand the role of a creature in the ecosystem, the first question he or she asks is, What does that creature eat, and what eats it? What, in other words, is its place in the food chain? Well, Homo sapiens is no exception. As William Ralph Inge, the English essayist, wrote early in the last century, ?all of nature is a conjugation of the verb to eat, in the active and passive.? Even the eating of a Twinkie represents transactions between species, though in the case of the Twinkie I?d be hard pressed to name all the species involved. (Have you read a Twinkie ingredient list lately? It?s long and full of surprises, one of which is beef.)

I teach a course at Berkeley?s graduate journalism school called ?Following the Food Chain,? and what my students quickly discover as they go down that trail is that it takes them to a great many unexpected places. Food connects us to nature, first and foremost, but it also attaches us to all the other large systems that organize our lives ? from energy and economics to politics, public health and cultural identity.

Pollan does a remarkably good job of humbly inviting us to contemplate the impact of our food choices. He has many well-reasoned positions, but he also shows a refreshing openness to debate and criticism.

The one criticism I have of Pollan is his tendency to underestimate the power and persistence of the forces he is up against on a political but especially a cultural level.

Politically, for example, in his constant insistence on the important of eating locally (even over eating organically), he is fond of making statements like this: “Local food has much lower energy costs, and as the era of cheap energy draws to a close, eating local will be more important than ever.” Is the era of cheap energy really drawing to a close? I wish — but I also know my history. I have seen how capitalism, coupled with the American obsession with convenience, always seems to find a way.

In terms of culture, Pollan understandably has little to say. He and most of other progressive food journalists out there (check out the latest Orion magazine, for example) are more concerned with raw economic processes. But this battle will be fought as much in our media as it is at the farmer’s market and on the dinner table.

Have you seen the latest Burger King “Manthem” commercials? They feature growing numbers of men abandoning their feminizing jobs and families, grabbing a Texas Double Whopper and finding their inner chauvinist. Sure, there is element of hyperbole here, but as with BK’s Whopperettes ad, if a satirical point is being made, it is lost in the men’s easy assumption of their supposedly new-found identity.

Combine this re-identification of men with meat with the proliferation of steakhouses and the manly culture they embody across the land. Aficionados of traditional meat-and-potatoes American cuisine are not taking all this talk about bovine growth hormones, childhood obesity, etc., lying down.

At least not until they’ve finished that really big steak.

My mother taught me a lot of things, only some of which I listened to. But you can bet I always abide by her #1 rule of shopping.

Which is why loved Sweatshopper.org’s new Walmart Tour podcast (via Marketplace). On it, artist Kris Hall takes you on a realtime tour of her local Walmart, guiding you in seeing the legions of security cameras, encouraging you to stop and think about the textile workers who make the $1/yard fabrics in the back of the store, and helping you buy a gun. I’m not really doing justice to the awesomeness of the podcast — it’s creepy and funny and gave me shivers in a few places, and I already thought I knew how bad Walmart is. Just download it to your mp3 player, drive to the parking lot of your local Walmart, and hit play.

While you’re on the way, you may also want to think about the recently released report by the AFL-CIO which details the ways in which the happyface people are happyfacedly weakening port security post-9/11 so as not to interfere with their profit margin. Here’s Evan from Peek:

The sickest part? The cost of all this security would come to a measly one-third of 1 percent of Wal-Mart’s $11.2 billion profits (that’s PROFITS) from last year. Or less than CEO Lee Scott’s compensation over the past couple years.

But you can get a toilet brush for freakin’ $2.99 so I guess it’s a wash.

Bonus: Ready for a little subversive action against mass consumerism? Vote for Veronica Arreola to win the “Swiffer Amazing Woman of the Year” Contest (yes, barf), and you not only stick Swiffer with a feminst activist & scientist whose husband does the housework for a spokeswoman, but you send $5K to WIMN, a most excellent grassroots media justice organization in great need of the funds.

The final weeks of 2005 marked a period of fervent reading, if not fervent posting. Time to honor the resolution of writing more frequently in 2006. But first, a brief review of bits of culture that came to an end.

A moment of silence, please, for the death of ?the old Mainstream Mass Culture,? which gave way to the rise of ?new, fragmented technoculture,? and, more importantly, the ?empowerment of the American consumer ? which isn’t quite the same as the American citizen?; ?the beginning of the end of serendipity,? thanks to that ability to customize culture; and don?t forget the mainstream media itself.

Farewell to great TV theme songs — and the formely reasonable expectation that you?ll know everything about a TV character if you watch every episode.

Goodbye to Renee Graham, who ended her ?Life in the Pop Lane? column with a look back at memorable moments of 2005 and ?those folks who through their remarkably stupid, illegal, and publicity-hungry actions made writing this column so easy for the past six years.?

(more…)

Commentators searching for a silver lining in the cloudy haze still lingering more than a week after Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast are finding it in the unprecedented response of the hip hop community toward the tragedy. Renee Graham of the Boston Globe articulates her reasons to hope:

Perhaps this rapid response to Hurricane Katrina will push the hip-hop community toward an era of renewed concern beyond material things. Certainly, its members are reacting to horror in their own backyards but also to the reality that communities of their fans are in desperate and dire need.

These articles place Kanye West’s emotional plea/indictment last Friday night in a nice context, revealing that the emotion — and the anger — isn’t isolated or easily dismissed.

The generosity and social awareness of the hip hop community is a complicated phenomenon, of course. All you to do is take a close look at Mr. West himself.

And most of us see the noisy involvement of celebrities at these moments to be a double-edged sword, at best. It’s hard to separate those seeking a great photo-op and those being genuinely altruistic — or to even draw that line for people who make their living by being famous.

People are still dying on the streets of New Orleans. Parts of the devastated Mississippi coast have not yet been visited by any aid. Animals of all kinds have been left in homes, on farms or wandering the streets.

It’s hard to think of the future at a time like this.

But many of us feel desperate and disempowered with our inability to help. We have posted futile messages offering shelter and more on every website we could find. We have offered to volunteer and are still awaiting a response. We have contemplated making independent trips down South but have jobs or people that are impossible to leave behind or are afraid we’d run out of gas before we got there.

In our case, let me make a suggestion.

Keep the anger alive.

Amidst the incomprehensible tragedy, there is a great opportunity for change — for renewal and reform — on two fronts.

First, it is now clear what we long suspected: the rhetoric of homeland security was smoke and mirrors — fomenting fear and domestic support for a policy of American neo-imperialism. I know that sounds like a cliched line from a left-wing academic. But, guess what, the winds of Katrina have exposed the administration — and the left-wing academics were right all along.

The clear neglect of FEMA as an organization, the dismissal of calls from engineers and congressmen to prioritize flood control in New Orleans, and the dispassionate and delayed response from the President have been irrefutable evidence in slow motion this week.

So — let’s never let this happen again. Let’s have the most prepared and precise emergency response organization in history. Let’s have it stand as a model for the world.

To do that, this administration needs to pay a price. A big price.

Second, New Orleans must be built again — from the ground up in many areas. With America shamed into facing its dirty little secret — the stark inequity between classes and races — maybe, just maybe, we can demand that the new New Orleans can become a place where everyone lives with dignity and respect.

Consider truly mixed income communities. A network of supported and coordinated social services that are accessible to all. Stellar public transportation. Healthcare for all. Great schools for all.

Why not?

I can’t imagine a better monument to all of those who have lost their lives.

During an NBC fundraising concert special for the victims of Hurricane Katrina, while most celebrities were reading their scripts from the teleprompter, Kanye West dared to go political:

I hate the way they portray us in the media. You see a black family and they say we are looting, you see a white family and they say they are looking for food. And, you know, its been five days because most of the people are black … We already realize a lot of the people that could help are at war right now, fighting another way. And now they’ve given them permission to go down and shoot us. George Bush doesn’t care about black people.

You can catch the entirety of his remarks (at least for now) on an MSNBC webpage. Just click on “Kanye West off the script.” In the rebroadcast of the concert this afternoon, they edited out the last sentence.

West was clearly overcome with emotion — and certainly wasn’t as articulate as he could have been — but his words came across loud and clear.

So much so that NBC has decided to apologize:

Tonight’s telecast was a live television event wrought with emotion. Kanye West departed from the scripted comments that were prepared for him, and his opinions in no way represent the views of the networks. It would be most unfortunate if the efforts of the artists who participated tonight and the generosity of millions of Americans who are helping those in need are overshadowed by one person’s opinion.

Overshadowed? I think the generosity of millions of Americans has already been frustrated by the inability of their government to harness their good will. Check out the New Orleans craigslist, to cite one example, and see how many people are willing to give up their homes, who are desperately trying to reunite people with their loved ones, who are simply offering transportation, etc.

Yet we haven’t seen a leader from our government emerge to direct that grassroots power — let alone a central website or 800 number to bring people together (FEMA has set up an 800 number to file claims).

So when West expresses a sense of neglect — which is, of course, a mere echo of what we hear almost unanimously from anyone on the ground along the Gulf Coast — don’t tune him out by saying he’s “playing the race card.”

Consider how he might have come to that conclusion.

Racism, of course, isn’t as simple as he makes it seems — one person definitively marginalizing an entire race. But on a more subtle, systemic level, our government didn’t care — or, at least, didn’t care enough.

Most of the nation — as we always do in times of crisis — would give the shirts of our back, the food in our refrigerators, our beds, etc, if someone just told us where to send them.

Why isn’t anybody ready to accept all of this good will?

Why is it a private organization — MoveOn.org — that has decided to harness the resources of the web to coordinate a housing network?

Why can reporters get to every part of New Orleans and other disaster areas and they can’t be followed by a few SUVs packed with fresh water and MREs?

Why if one Blackhawk helicopter can drop off water and food at the Convention Center can we not have ten helicopters right behind it?

Please do not get me wrong. Everyone who is flying those helicopters — everybody doing work on the ground, in the air and on the water — are doing superhuman work. Not sleeping and battling physical and emotional stress.

I’m certainly not blaming them. I’m blaming the larger lack of foresight and the screwed-up political priorities that has left us vulnerable.

I’m also sad and angry that it takes a tragedy like this to begin a conversation about poverty in this country — a crisis that dwarfs any natural disaster we could ever encounter.

What’s your rant?

This afternoon I heard the director of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff (on NPR) and the director of FEMA Mike Brown (on CNN) dance around questions about why — over four days after Katrina hit — we haven’t yet seen troops or rescue workers in the most critical areas of New Orleans and the rest of the Gulf coast.

They tried to claim the extent of the catastrophe surprised and simply overwhelmed them.

As is evident from the previous post, I think I’d rather send my tax dollars to the reporters at the New Orleans Times-Picayune.

Come on. A flood is a flood. I could have set up a little model of New Orleans, simulated the ocean breaking through levees and figured out the Superdome was a stupid idea.

I also would have figured out that, if those levees ever broke, I would need to send every possible resource immediately. Every plane, every helicopter, every ship, every boat.

And I would have known that I couldn’t sneak in one more day of vacation — even if I promised I would get to work as soon as I get back. (Check out the New York Times’ blistering editorial connecting the dots throughout the Bush administration’s tenure).

And I would be there (or as close as I could get) — not via a long stay in Washington — but straight from Crawford. I’d be getting my hands dirty.

And I would stop scapegoating the people of New Orleans as the reason for why no troops or rescue crews have gotten to the most critical areas. I know there are legitimate security concerns — but I’m sure there’s nothing thousands of troops can’t handle.

Where are they?

The alternative media has been the place to go for a true exploration of the broad context of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath.

Jack Shafer writes in Slate about why TV networks aren’t talking about the elephants in the middle of the storm: race and class.

His conclusion is undeniable:

When disaster strikes, Americans?especially journalists?like to pretend that no matter who gets hit, no matter what race, color, creed, or socioeconomic level they hail from, we’re all in it together. This spirit informs the 1997 disaster flick Volcano, in which a “can’t we all just get along” moment arrives at the film’s end: Volcanic ash covers every face in the big crowd scene, and everybody realizes that we’re all members of one united race.

But we aren’t one united race, we aren’t one united class, and Katrina didn’t hit all folks equally. By failing to acknowledge upfront that black New Orleanians?and perhaps black Mississippians?suffered more from Katrina than whites, the TV talkers may escape potential accusations that they’re racist. But by ignoring race and class, they boot the journalistic opportunity to bring attention to the disenfranchisement of a whole definable segment of the population. What I wouldn’t pay to hear a Fox anchor ask, “Say, Bob, why are these African-Americans so poor to begin with?”

Shafer’s analysis only falls short when he attributes this dismissal of race to fear of appearing racist. I think it has a lot more to do with conversatives’ long and relentless battle to categorize any discussion of race in America as “political correctness” or “playing the race card.”

Shafer otherwise is right on — especially in unearthing an amazing five-part article from the New Orleans Times-Picayune that foreshadowed this disaster and how the cost would be borne by the most vulnerable.

On another note, the Institute for Policy Accuracy has compiled a devastating list of sources that show clearly and unequivocally how the Bush administration’s prioritizing of the Iraq War left News Orleans unprotected.

The mainstream media finally seems to be catching up to — or more likely, has become inspired by — bloggers and other news sources

CNN has begun educating people about New Orleans with factoids before every break. Anderson Cooper — whose emotional response to stories makes him a poor anchor — is doing some inspired reporting. He seems to have been radicalized by the events around him — demanding answers from any politician or bureaucrat he interviews. Update:Geez — even Paula Zahn just took on the director of FEMA.

NBC Nightly news put together a piece (posted on MSNBC) on how Katrina has exposed New Orleans deep poverty.

This, I’m afraid, is a little late. The exploitative tone these major news outlets set in the last couple of days is in danger of defining the story as one of lawlessness by the African American community of New Orleans rather than on of disregard for our urban poor — both historically and in the delayed government response to the present tragedy.

What a disturbing evening. The images are horrible enough. The pain, loss and confusion are devastating enough. The future for the citizens of New Orleans and the coastal towns in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina is bleak enough.

Did we really need to see the coverage on 24-hour-news channels implode once again? Did we really need to see them abdicate their journalistic responsibility and add a flood of fuel to the fire with their insatiable need for narrative, for crafting a sensationalistic story from every tragic angle?

My outrage reached its peak when CNN, MSNBC, and Fox, began getting video footage of looting.

On my ride home I had listened to an NPR report that made it clear that for the people that remained in New Orleans, basic supplies — drinking water, in particular — were dangerously scarce. The report described looting — but it made it clear than many of the “looters” were in survival mode. One women they interviewed, in particular, tearfully expressed her shame that she was forced into doing something that she had always condemned.

Switch over to the news channels and all you got was how-dare-they gaping mouths of Rita Crosby or Sean Hannity. Or the Alabama attorney general doing his best good ol’ boy impression and letting us know again and again that “it will not be tolerated” and “that won’t happen in Alabama.”

No context. Just judgments — from the comfortable situation rooms in New York, Atlanta and elsewhere.

Through it all, moreover, you feel the subtle shaking of heads. Why didn’t they just get out of there? Why were they so foolhardy?

Of course we know why. We just don’t want to say — or even admit.

The context that no one dares report is that this is about race and class. We live in a country where the “haves” get to leave the city and the “have-nots” have to weather the storm.

Yeah, I know, what were we supposed to do? We didn’t have cars for everyone. We tried the Superdome.

Our responsibility, however, goes back much further than this crisis moment. Who will be the first to admit that this isn’t just a natural disaster? When will start realizing — and reporting — that this is very much a tragedy of our own making?

I’m afraid that day may never come. The same news channels have never taken responsibility for the unbridled enthusiasm of the embedded reporters during the initial stages of the Gulf War. Their enthusiasm, of course, set the foundation for the subsequent years of White House deception — when they would have us believe that our mission was holy, Iraqis desperately wanted us to bring them “freedom,” and weapons of mass destruction were just around the corner.

?but it is a REALLY great idea for the helplessly car-addicted. (OK, guilty as charged.) The TerraPass does for your four-wheeled friend what emissions trading does for industrial companies ? it lets you buy the “right” to pollute by paying for enough clean energy to offset the dirty stuff you?re spewing out your muffler.

It?s remarkably cheap and easy. Just tell TerraPass about your car and your annual mileage, and they?ll tell you what level pass you need to counteract the impact of your nasty habit. My 1998 Corolla qualified for an ?Efficient? Pass, which set me back $39.95 for the year, and comes with a decal I can display in my car window, a bumper sticker, and other nifty swag.

What a lovely surprise to learn that I can undo my car?s annual damage for less than the cost of two tanks of gas!

Since their launch in May, TerraPass members have already offset over 14,526,000 lbs of CO2 (7,689 of which are mine). But that?s not even 2,000 Passes sold — a speck on a drop in the ocean compared to the approximately 500,000,000 cars in the world. Wanna take care of another few specks? You know what to do.

Read more at Wired.