One more try because my intentions are good

Let's go at this from another direction.

Let's pretend I'm Joe Rock Star. A stretch, I admit, but go with it for a moment. I have a pretty limited skill set, but I can sing and plunk away at a stringed instrument in a manner pleasing to a lot of people. I tour the country and people continuously tell me how wonderful I am. I'm not actually all that wonderful in a universal sense, but I'm pretty darn great in the singing and plunking realm.

Time passes. Every day I begin to believe my own press more and more. But my publicist tells me I need to take on a social cause in order to keep from appearing shallow, self-absorbed, and two-dimensional. I actually am pretty shallow, self-absorbed, and two dimensional, but agents and publicists believe that people want their musical idols to have well-rounded personalities. So my entourage begins the task of finding me a suitable social cause to champion.

Lucky for me, people are starving in Africa. The music-listening public finds pictures of skeletal African waifs with bloated bellies and flies crawling over their eyeballs abhorrent, as well they should. Bingo, a cause has surfaced. Now I haven't got a clue about the subtleties of African geopolitical interplay and neither does any of my entourage, but I'm rich enough to hire someone to give me the suitable sound bites and school me in the proper way to look concerned, so off we go.

We organize a huge concert with other singing plunkers who need three dimensional images. We plan it well out in the future so there can be plenty of hype. The media, celebrity whores that they are, give us boundless hours of free coverage. We're rolling toward an event that will net a gazillion dollars in direct and indirect commerce.

The day comes and we hold the concert. It's a huge success. Agents, publicists, tee shirt vendors all walk off with their pockets bulging. We begin to work the logistics of getting the money and the food to Africa. Being the shallow and two dimensional fellow that I am and not knowing much of anything other than singing and plunking, I leave all that up to the people I have hired to handle it. A few questions come up about what is happening to all the proceeds of the concert, but my handlers provide me with suitably obscure answers and I never take direct questions at a press conference. I get plenty of help looking suitably annoyed that anyone would have the temerity to question my pristine motives.

All is well, right? Well, maybe not. It turns out some of the tinpot dictators we gave a lot of food and money to decided to sell the food and use the money to buy weapons for their death squads. Since we were supposedly providing buttloads of food to these countries, other aid organizations have redirected their efforts. Now areas that were receiving other aid are now receiving none. People who were subsisting begin to starve. I am such a huge mega-celebrity, the press would never even think of associating increased death squad activity with my charitable efforts, so the international community looks the other way or remains clueless. The death squads become more efficient and brazen, killing more "dissidents" (a.k.a innocent civilians) every day.

So you tell me. Are these Africans better off because Mr. Mega-Celebrity-Rock-Star decided to improve his image and blundered into a complex international situation, inevitably making things worse? Or would they have been better of if Mr. Mega-Celebrity-Rock-Star had been a little more circumspect, not to mention quiet, and simply donated large portions of the proceeds of his regular activities to organizations already in place and familiar with the situation, as well as convincing all of his friends to do the same. And can we not argue that given the fact that their situation became notably worse because of the activities of Mr. Mega-Celebrity-Rock-Star, the Africans would have been better off if he had done nothing?

I've got to tell you, having personally occupied space in any number of third world hellholes, Americans and Europeans don't get a bad name in these places because of people like George Bush, Dick Cheney, and Tony Blair. They get a bad name from people like Geldof, Madonna, and Bono who don't give a red hot rat's behind for these places outside of their ability to provide fodder for further inflating their own bloated egos. These people give us all a bad name because they accomplish nothing, or worse yet, aggravate the situation, and then spend months, maybe years tooting their own horns and having their horns adoringly tooted by the fawning Western media.