...What in the holy hell was that? It was like that part in Clockwork Orange, crossed with the Jerry Lewis telethon. My irony meter is like permanently bent. I think I cried. I think I went running all Sanjaya wild through the streets. I don't really remember what happened. Ryan held down the stage at the Idol studios, and Ellen D was taking care of business at the Walt Disney Concert Hall, those things are true. So but then Earth Wind & Fire goes insane on a medley of songs, and then Randy remembers how New Orleans had a crackhead Leroy, then a Katrina, and then shows us how much things still suck there, and it's pretty hard to deal with, because the trailer parks FEMA gave them are full of drugs and gunshots so the kids can't go outside, but there's a community center that gives them a safe place to be, which needs money. The Idols hang out with Quincy Jones, and then sing a world-music kind of song about how it's time to care, with total insanity noises in the background like Banjo & Kazooie, which is only mildly insulting in that Lion King way, then Ben Stiller persists in thinking he's just the cutest fucking thing, then we see the gritty details of Simon and Ryan's trip to Africa, and they are quite gritty, and they include cryin' Ryan and cryin' Simon, and I guess I do have feelings, because turns out I cannot handle those two men crying for anything, so I was pretty much a waste for the hour, and then Melinda is safe at this point, then Paula goes to the Boys & Girls Club around the corner and meets a little girl who isn't entirely believable but nonetheless has a believably hard life. Paula cries; I feel nothing.
Then Il Divo. Not in my fuckin' house.
Then Jack Black being, as usual, so mysteriously effin' hot, and Blake is safe, and still makes me wanna shoop, and then Carrie sings to African kids and then puts flowers on their parents' graves. This is in a music video. Then Rascal Flatts sings a song, then we go to Kentucky, which is even more tragic than we thought, and much is made of illiteracy, which is my personal thing I really can't handle and makes me hand out money, so that's when I donated some money, then the pimpmercial is "Crazy Little Thing Called Love," but inside the pimpmercial is a total freak-out hell-ride of a bunch of celebrities singing "Stayin' Alive," and that part was very GOD LOVES YOU AS HE LOVED JACOB, and supremely freaky, then Phil is safe, then Ryan and Simon cry some more in Africa, and it's heartbreaking, and like twice as intense, and I'm kind of not ready to talk about that either, so then Ellen pledges $100,000 and challenges her rich friends to match it, then she starts crying while she introduces Josh Groban, singing "The Josh Groban Song" with the African Children's Choir, then we meet some people from ExxonMobil and Esso Angola, who say with a straight face that they give a fuck about saving the lives of the people they're murdering, then a hundred actors say how many funerals they've been to, and all the movie stars in the world cannot equal the funerals that this one old African guy has been to, and most of them were kids, and lots of them were from malaria, which is stupid easy to fix if you've got a few bucks, and then Kelly Clarkson sings "Up To The Mountain" with Jeff Beck, Ben Stiller's still douching it up, the Simpsons feed Simpsonized Simon to the lions that ate Dunkelman, and then Lakisha is safe; at this point I stopped crying about Africa and started worrying about Jordin.
Randy hangs out with a kid and throws a football. The charities are: Save The Children, Boys & Girls Clubs, the Children's Health Fund, and America's Second Harvest. They are good charities and you should donate to them on any old day and not just via this stupid show. Then Celine Dion sings a duet with ELVIS PRESLEY. IN THE PAST. It's like Forrest Gump. In many, many ways. I got my cynicism back at that point, which was good because then there was Madonna in a moon-landing-fake kind of Malawi -- or, as she calls it, "the baby store" -- all guilting you and being all sucky, and then Annie Lennox singing "Bridge Over Troubled Water" dressed like Kat McPhee, lots of intense African kids, and then Chris and Jordin are left, and then Chris is safe! Jordin is not! It's shocking! But then Jordin is safe too!
So all the votes from this week go to week, and they lose the bottom two, and that's when Jordin wigs out, and then they sing "American Prayer," a song I suppose, with Bono lurking about, and he tells them all manner of things, including another really depressing story about a kid that died, and then they group-sing that song again. I am going to go take a nap for one million years and then do some thinking about these things. So far here's what I've got: I am glad that Sting wasn't there. It's pretty cynical to trade on the misfortune of others when you're part of the very multinational conglomerate that depends on keeping them down; it's pretty awesome to do something to make a change, even if it's something small. What makes me feel cynical is patting yourself on the back for doing so, when what you really need to be feeling is not fake bullshit Hallmark pride and a sensitive Phil Stacey kind of feeling that you cannot name, that will fade by tomorrow morning, when your real life starts up again. What you need is a holy Sanjaya kind of anger that doesn't stop until you've accomplished the job, today and all the days that come after that, until the end of your life, and that's how you know you changed the world.
Ryan starts out not really bringing his "A" game, and has to do the intro over again, including panning the camera backwards along the line of Idols, who are all wearing personalized bright-white outfits, and doing the whole thing over again. Ryan's smoothness is such that even as you're watching him fuck up, for like the first time ever, he gives the strong impression that it is not a fuckup, and that he and the camera guy are going to work together to bring this unfortunate situation to a conclusion agreeable to all parties. The judges are dressed up super nice for tonight's mega-nuts event, and you can see Simon's entire torso, which flirts with Ryan to an amazing degree, along with the rest of him. When they get like this it's confusing; it's like trying to be equal friends with both halves of a married couple: impossible and a little creepy. Ryan tells us that his "good friend" Ellen Degeneres is over at the Walt Disney concert hall, simulcasting or something. Ryan Seacrest called Ellen his good friend! Is that code for something? OMG are they dating?
Ellen offers for the millionth time to sing "Shoop," like she does at least once a day, and for the sixteenth year running, nobody's interested. "Ladies, what's my weakness? Australian Lipstick Lesbians!" Mine too! There's nothing worse than seeing Ellen at a loss, because she is so wonderful when she's on, but when she rests on her shtick like this, or God forbid gets aggressively earnest in the middle of a bit, it's hard to watch. I will always love her, but I think we should tell her that she doesn't have to be on all the time. That tank won't run on empty, but she persists in driving sometimes when the needle's past the red, and it's so unnecessary, because she's awesome just being normal. She simultroduces Earth Wind & Fire, who...seem to be from the future. The man sings like a lady, but dresses like an intergalactic assassin. Earth Wind & Fire is now my favorite band, I had no idea. They perform some disco song about a "Boogie Wonderland," I think, and it occurs to me that like, you know how I don't know the names of any songs? That's going to kill us tonight, because it's two hours of wall-to-wall singing, plus some AIDS. That's the mandate. There's a man playing the guitar that looks like Melinda. Oh, it's a medley! We'll just pretend I didn't say that above, because I actually do know all the songs. And as long as we're pretending, let's also pretending that I'm not bleep-blooping past my new favorite band.
Back to Ryan. Allstate produces a story about Randy remembering the 2004 New Orleans auditions, including that crackhead Leroy. Then, a year later, Katrina. The crowds were not quite so jubilant about that; they totally start with the scary music immediately. There's a bunch of footage of driving through the modern hell of New Orleans, and because this show is nothing if not on the nose, they start playing "Do You Know What It Means To Miss New Orleans?" I don't know what to do with that. This whole two hours is bipolar? So you laugh and then it's like, "Now cry! Now laugh! Now stand up! Turn to Hymn #54! Sit down! Pray! Sign of the Cross! Cry! Laugh! Sing! Sit! Roll over!" and it's like, this whole event is so exhausting in many ways, but at least it limbers up your mental flexibility, because to navigate it at all you have to roll with those punches and stay with it. It's an endurance challenge. Randy sits in an air-conditioned sedan, being driven around. "The Dawg has come home...[beat]...to my home state." Because Randy's not actually from New Orleans, and we know that. He explains how...okay, you remember how Katrina ate New Orleans, and all those people died, and the rest of them were taken out of their homes and put into subhuman conditions at gunpoint, for months on end, because FEMA dropped every ball or spherical object it could get its hands on, and then after a few weeks, George Bush flew over it in a plane and couldn't even see the individual people? That's the nature of tragedy: too many small pictures adding up to a big picture that doesn't hurt. So anyway, things still suck in New Orleans. And everybody got tired of hearing about it, which is also the nature of tragedy, and started saying things like how they should clean up their own messes and stop waiting for the government to fix it. Because that's not the point of government anymore, that's not the point of the social contract, that you give up certain rights and privileges in order to have a safe place to land when things get too big to handle; no. The point of government no longer signifies; we clean up our own messes now.
Back to Ryan. Allstate produces a story about Randy remembering the 2004 New Orleans auditions, including that crackhead Leroy. Then, a year later, Katrina. The crowds were not quite so jubilant about that; they totally start with the scary music immediately. There's a bunch of footage of driving through the modern hell of New Orleans, and because this show is nothing if not on the nose, they start playing "Do You Know What It Means To Miss New Orleans?" I don't know what to do with that. This whole two hours is bipolar? So you laugh and then it's like, "Now cry! Now laugh! Now stand up! Turn to Hymn #54! Sit down! Pray! Sign of the Cross! Cry! Laugh! Sing! Sit! Roll over!" and it's like, this whole event is so exhausting in many ways, but at least it limbers up your mental flexibility, because to navigate it at all you have to roll with those punches and stay with it. It's an endurance challenge. Randy sits in an air-conditioned sedan, being driven around. "The Dawg has come home...[beat]...to my home state." Because Randy's not actually from New Orleans, and we know that. He explains how...okay, you remember how Katrina ate New Orleans, and all those people died, and the rest of them were taken out of their homes and put into subhuman conditions at gunpoint, for months on end, because FEMA dropped every ball or spherical object it could get its hands on, and then after a few weeks, George Bush flew over it in a plane and couldn't even see the individual people? That's the nature of tragedy: too many small pictures adding up to a big picture that doesn't hurt. So anyway, things still suck in New Orleans. And everybody got tired of hearing about it, which is also the nature of tragedy, and started saying things like how they should clean up their own messes and stop waiting for the government to fix it. Because that's not the point of government anymore, that's not the point of the social contract, that you give up certain rights and privileges in order to have a safe place to land when things get too big to handle; no. The point of government no longer signifies; we clean up our own messes now.
A woman tells Randy that Katrina did not unite the community as one might hope, because people are fallible. He describes it akin to "the forgotten land"; he stands in a kitchen that reeks of poverty, and holds up a woman barely able to stand, as she gives in to exhaustion and weeps into his shoulder. He promises her that it will get better. It will. She sniffles into his shoulder, still in shock, still shattered into that innocent honesty that only trauma can unearth: "I really need it to." She continues to stand, with her arms around him, nearly sleeping, upright.
FEMA park, full of temp trailers, two years later and they're still in hell. A woman raises her six kids in a trailer and won't let them go outside. She cages them up in horror, to save them from the hell outside: shootings, guns, drugs and horror. The human capacity for evil that takes over when nature relents. The desperation of the destroyed. It was never about the banality of evil: it's the evil of banality we're seeing. When pain accretes it becomes a dull roar, and you can overlook it altogether, if that's what you need to do. One child begs for a new home, away from the guns; two little girls play on a pile of broken road, huge chunks of tar and stone and paving, a collection of hard edges in the hot southern sun: this is what a sandbox looks like in hell. They find a way to go on playing: kids don't have a word for "hope" because they don't need one yet.
God forbid that evocative, self-sufficient image be allowed to stand: "What A Fuckin' Wonderful World" starts to play as we visit the community center in the FEMA park, where Save The Children puts on dance-offs, basketball games, movie nights, anything to distract them from the truth all around them. Anything to give them a safe place, and time, to be kids. We're reminded that tonight's our chance to make a difference. Nobody mentions that yesterday was also our chance to make a difference, or the day before that, or tomorrow, or the day after that. Nobody mentions that the government's chance to make a difference was two years ago, and further back than that, but poor black people are not known for the power of their lobbying bloc, or their contributions to the American economy; they didn't Give Back like Idol, and they didn't signify at all once they started shooting back. Not like the rich white folks in the twin towers. Katrina was only ever three-fifths of a tragedy.
Sanjaya sits in the audience with Pothead Shyamali and their pot-growing mom, and the rage on his face is so intense could be almost any emotion at all. I'm still so proud of that kid. Ryan introduces Quincy Jones and quickly bridges to his intro package, in case he tries to tell us again what The Color Purple is about. "I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it." That's what the book's about. Sometimes I think it's the only quote that ever mattered. Entire novels rest inside it. Quincy Jones has been on the pity market for a long time; he wrote "We Are The World," and "Time To Care," and whatever. The entire last round of this cycle, when the companies get too big for their bitches and realize the country needs a second to rest. Two Minutes' Love, just to let the pressure off. The charity doesn't matter, the identities of the suffering aren't the point: it's the identity of the charitable that's being affirmed. We bounce all two hours between senseless tragedies and man-made ones, blending them together: AIDS malaria starvation illiteracy drugs guns and killing. The word last night was "palimpsest," but that's all this will ever be: a thousand different fonts and a thousand different spellings and elderly scrawls and weak handwriting and a child's block print scribble, on a piece of paper as big as the world, just one word over and over, until you can't even read it anymore. "HELP."
Melinda asks Quincy about his inspiration for this new identical song, and the answer is not "all those other songs I'm still getting royalties from," but in fact a palimpsest of its own: Africa, and also Katrina. Jordin is wonderful, Quincy adores them all. A little girl does awesome little dances, and some random Crying African Kid footage, and some kind of ethnic fake world music with African whoops and nature sounds... Oh. That's the song. There's a brute amount of insane noises in the background the whole time, it's like Banjo & Kazooie. All the kids have their white costumes individualized: Blake's collar is deliciously popped, Phil's covered his awful head with a newsboy cap. Chris has a K-Fed hoodie on under his suit jacket like it's 2003. The song sounds like a lot of other songs, and thus will sell a million copies for charity. Phil's chest-thumping righteousness is to be expected. The song sounds like if Elton John had been like, "The Lion King: is it ethnic enough?" Quincy's dressed like he's in the Rhythm Nation; Blake's pants are satisfactory amounts of magical. Will Truman says the numbers again, and exhorts "everyone that ever voted for Sanjaya" to contribute even a dollar: "We could do so much good!"
Ross Gellar is turning into Joey Fatone at a truly remarkable rate. He doesn't quip, just gives the numbers again. Sanjaya smiles sweetly; he probably remembers watching Friends when he was a baby. That show is older than him; it makes me feel shivery but also excited about the future. Ryan and Ben Stiller tool around at length with the Usual Ben Stiller Bullshit, like, the camera link is somehow troubled, and thus we're "treated" to about ten minutes of Ben Stiller disingenuously bitching about his hair off-camera and then fake-going, "Hi!" Does he have some kind of appearance rider? I swear I've seen him do this exact same riff every day of my life. His gray hair makes him look cuter, something I always thought was beyond science, and he names all the movies that he was in and it's funny how quickly you deduce that they are the same movie. He threatens to sing "Reminiscing" by the Little River Band until $200B are raised, hopefully in enough time for Kelly Clarkson to perform, or whoever else they have lined up, for example [insert desperate hipster reference to Pure Prairie League], and like...God, I hate Ben Stiller. It didn't happen all at once and I didn't know it was happening until it was too late. I've missed out on so many Ben Stiller movies that I'll never see, because I thought I had all the time in the world. You never see the one that gets you, I guess.
Ryan's wearing a three-piece and looks like $200B his own self, and Ben Stiller starts dancing, and Ryan plays along with the joke some more and thinks about how sometimes this is how you feed the beast. He mentions his Africa trip with Simon again, a major feature of this night's entertainment, and Paula totally cocks one eyebrow like, "...And then they did it." Ryan is very earnest saying that they will never, ever forget that trip. Like you'll let us! Some African kids sing God songs, and Simon and Ryan watch. The twelve-year-old man of the house answers a few questions bravely before abruptly breaking into sobs; Ryan Seacrest holds him tight, and starts to cry. Simon watches. It's super goddamned intense but not especially awkward. It's not the bad kind of naked. To see Ryan Seacrest on a dirty floor, overcome with love and admiration for this kid, to see Ryan Seacrest recognize that kind of strength, and lay himself down in front of it, is nothing short of amazing. I didn't know you could love Ryan more; I literally did not know that was a possibility. I thought I'd hit the brick wall on that one.
In a country of 50,000 orphans, in a palimpsest of horror, there's a twelve-year-old boy named Grauman. He's a father to orphans; from nowhere he pulled out bravery and power and managed to do something most of us are still working on. He's more exhausted than any one person I've ever seen. The sons and daughters of Grauman sit and lean and stand; some of them could be older than him. Ryan begs the fathers of America to see this boy, their brother, to see the grace of what we can do, what's possible, what we're capable of doing. "This is the world's hardest working dad right here," says Ryan, and almost loses it again. Grauman smiles through his tears and continues to stand. Ryan and Simon can't even look at each other any more, it's too intense. They're like two men at adjoining urinals, only instead of their junk hanging out, it's their all of it. Story is the only way we can transmit any knowledge of anything, to each other or to the future; telling stories is how we distance ourselves from things, but it's also how we rise, and that's what they're trying to do here. Grauman pops out of the palimpsest and Ryan can see him, can see he's real, and it changes Ryan, because now he knows a Grauman, forever. And we already knew Ryan, so it's real now too for us? Or: Ryan holds onto Grauman with one hand, and with the other tries to tell us the untellable, to demonstrate simply by staring, naked, at the camera, that if we are not alone, then neither is Grauman, and neither is Ryan, and I don't know how to do this.
Ben Stiller continues to sing his unending song, in the styles of various people; Teri Hatcher's sun-bleached corpse fucks around in blue eyeshadow and an off-the-shoulder She's A Maniac shirt. Forest Whitaker gets emotional in and about Uganda, because of a very good movie nobody saw, about Idi Amin. A connoisseur of the evil of banality and the banality of evil. Onstage, Ryan randomly pronounces Melinda safe, obviously, but that doesn't stop Jordin giggling and bouncing around all jolly.
Paula bounces around the corner to the Boys & Girls Club Hollywood, where the kids scream their asses off and jumble like puppies to shake her hand. There are only four thousand Boys & Girls Clubs in the country, she tells us. Some of them, by a show of hands, want to sing onstage one day; surprisingly -- to Paula, too -- the same number or more want to be President one day. I say we give it a shot. The head of this particular club is awesome, awesome, really likeable and cool. She explains about the importance of creating a safe place for the children of poverty, in the middle of the second-richest city in the world. Paula asks the children if it isn't safe to say that they live in hell, and asks them where they'd be if they weren't here. One little girl, eye always half on the cameras rolling, offers that she'd be "somewhere else," and Paula smiles: her mom's working either way, so if she weren't here, she'd be at some other hopefully safe place. Paula nods: "My mom worked all the time, too." She explains that she started in dance for this reason, for safety. The little girl starts to give a slightly precocious speech about how she also needs a route for self-expression, feints to the left about how her mom has three jobs, and then bumbles about for awhile before breaking down into tears. It's not really that moving, at least until Paula kisses her fakely. "You're not alone. At least you're not alone." She is and she isn't. Paula reads off a card or something, saying true things in a voice that makes it questionable somehow: "These kids are the future of this country. They need our help, and they deserve it." True statements, and something so mind-blowingly obvious and self-evident that I will never understand how it gets overlooked. How teaching can be a LCD employment choice, when it should be the most important job there is. How can you, as a parent -- fuck, as a person period -- forget for a second that you're going to die one day, and then all that's left is these kids? Who's raising them? Who's teaching them to love? Who's reminding them that they're not alone? Who's covering for them, while they're covering for you?
Ellen says something about how more money to charity is better than less, but you should give what you can, then Il Divo singing what I'm sure was a lovely rendition of some song I may or may not have heard, but I have a deal with myself about those boys where they don't come into my sphere of influence, so we're skipping that part. Well, I don't want you to feel cheated, so: Something like, they are all greasy and not that cute, and singing that French Horn Tenors opera way, with ponytails, but it's not opera, it's soft pop hits from a billion years ago, or maybe Broadway, and they all stand there at their microphones making passionate faces, and it is very boring and pretty weird and very Phil Stacey. Then there's a short clip of Dr. Phil, sucking his usual amount of dick.
Then HOUSE! Talking that crazy way! He doesn't say anything funny, but then Ryan wows about how "House has an accent!" Me and Ryan, sometimes we're like this, sometimes we're like that, but this week is just amazing. Ryan offers to let a volunteer onstage for like $50 bucks, to show how wild they are about eliciting donations, and the camera pans down the front row, and Jack Black's digging around in his pocket. Man, I hope he's not kidding. I would pay so much money for even five seconds of him onscreen. I would pay up to $5000 of American money to kiss that man on the mouth. He's so mysteriously hot. He's like the male Cameron Diaz: fifteen thousand wrong things, adding up to precisely wonderful. Or well, I mean, if Cameron Diaz didn't ruin it with her stupid awful personality. THEN HE WINS! I AM MAGIC! Ryan calls him up onstage. Look at him. God, he's perfection. It's like: Blake is here, and then Jack Black is right about here. Jack Black pushes Ryan away and calls him "crusty," for some reason, and it occurs to me that one Ryan is good, and one Jack Black is good, but Ryan + Jack Black onstage at the same time is like way too much of whatever that is that they are both about. I bet Ryan Seacrest haaaaaaaates Jack Black. Jack Black : Ryan Seacrest :: Amy Winehouse : Jessica Simpson. Four flavors of awesome, but not together. You wouldn't put Seacrest's pink fro-yo on your Jack Black Bob's Big Boy Burger: it would taste gross. I wonder if Ryan will attack Jack Black, and what that would look like. I bet he's a biter.
Then Jack Black sings "Kiss From A Rose," from Batman Returns ("the most sensitive of all the Batmans") ["And I will hereby preempt all your emails by saying it was actually from Batman Forever, which was, in fact, the most black-lighted of all the Batmans. Not that I blame Jack Black for disavowing its existence." -- Joe R] and Kyle starts crying and shuddering like that little Sanjaya girl, down in the audience, and Jack does crazy twirls and tries desperately to stay off key, or else it's not funny. At the close of this wonderland, Simon says he was worse than Sanjaya, and Jack gets snotty about how if Seal were here, he'd totally love it, and Seal is sitting to the judges suddenly, and says it was the best rendition ever, and Simon rolls his eyes, and Jack Black screams at the audience: "They're not the deciders!" Awesome. Then things go a Jack Black kind of south as he starts into "The Greatest Love Of All," and Ryan kind of loses control of things altogether, and Jack Black goes running all over the place singing, and the band actually kinda plays along, and oh, Ryan is not having this. It's so scary but also thrilling to see the secret intensity of Seacrest. I don't want to have to choose between the two of them. So finally Ryan gets Jack sorted out, of course, and then Blake is, of course, safe.
Then there is a chain reaction of bullshit and terrible stuff: Carrie Underwood sings "I'll Stand By You," in a music video, where she sings to African kids who not only don't know who she is, but don't know what she's saying, and her giant sad face and realistic emotions, and hugs, and singing to them some more, and it's all very weird and fake but well-crafted, and one of the guys teaches them to play the fiddle, but then suddenly she's like Pied Pipering them to the graveyard, and they put flowers on their moms' graves, and the whole time she's singing, and you just kind of have to check out. Carrie Underwood as Trauma Barbie Mary Poppins Death-Eater is just way too much to deal with, and there's so much other fucked-up stuff to deal with coming up.
Ellen does more of her shtick, doesn't matter, and then there's that whiny fat-faced man that is Rascal Flatts, and I am still not sure if that's a person or a whole band; Carrie looks really good, I suppose, but I don't need to be seeing any Rascal Flatts. Then back at the real audience, Ryan is talking to Tom from MySpace, who is much better looking in real life on TV than he is in fake life on the World Wide Web. And he's my friend on MySpace! ["Oh my God! You're never going to believe this..."-- Joe R] At some point, Ryan threatens, we'll see thirty-six "world-class" stars, singing "Stayin' Alive." With which I take extreme issue. Think about it.
Kentucky, Paula tells us, is no fun. What is fun, though, is the postmodern thrill of listening to Paula Abdul trying desperately to read aloud about illiteracy. Some of those scary kids like the beginning of Mean Girls sit around with hay coming out their mouths and telling us some Boomhauer Bucky Covington things about things, that I didn't really catch too much of. Education is important, because if you don't have education, you cain't get a job. A man explains that back in the day, before we turned our backs on farmers, a "strong back and a weak mind" were the low bar you had to meet, because you could always get a job doing something, but now that everybody's on the same playing field, there aren't enough strong back/weak mind jobs to go around, resulting in a pretty awful downward spiral that consumes everyone. The accumulation of generational wealth is interdependent on the accumulation of generational ignorance. Follow the money: My Dad's rich, and a lawyer. He pays for his five sons to go to college, where they learn the cheat codes for the country, and go on to have children, whom they send to college. It's not a party everybody can go to. The widening middle class depends on these two graphs operating in tandem, as the rich get richer and the poor are denied more and more of the tools they could use to change their lives. If the education you get, such as it is, in public school is available by definition to everybody, then the quality of the education still doesn't matter, because the people at the top are going to define success as an undergrad degree. Too much politically correct affirmative action, and suddenly anybody can get a bachelors, so you gotta go to grad school. And everybody that doesn't look like you gets shaken off the tree, and if they don't, if they force their way through the whole system, they get to deal with impossible decisions, impossible expectations, impossibly well-veiled accusations of illegitimacy, and in this way the power and the money stay in exactly the hands it wants to, generation after generation, and public schools get worse and private schools get better, and one day after not that long, you get Kentucky. Bred for failure. Strong backs and weak minds, and there's you, shrugging disingenuously, because if you can do it, why can't they? And then you get to bitch because they won't clean up their own mess, because that is the privilege of the ruling class: to clap itself on the back for its success, while doing everything it can to pull Jenga on everybody else.
Nearly half the adults in this Kentucky county didn't finish high school. That's vile. That's my failure and yours; these are our people. There's nothing quite so hateful as pretending you belong to an America better than this; there's nothing so important as loving these parts of America most of all. If you can't do that, you've lost something. A young mother tells us she wants at least one of her kids to finish school, takes a moment and corrects herself: all three. She can't read. I pulled out my checkbook. When I was about seven, I didn't understand that reading was hard. It's like the one thing I can do easily: words. And I'm in a public library in Phoenix Arizona, and my mom's in Sci-Fi, and I'm trying to sneak over to the Adult books section because I've read everything already but I'm paranoid that they're going to think I'm looking for sex or whatever gross grownup stuff. War. Pictures of death. I just wanted a novel. And I'm looking around, bumping into tables, trying to turn myself invisible long enough to get across the wide opens spaces of the library, and I back into a table, and when I turn around, there's a girl sitting there with a woman, sounding out the Berenstain Bears, letter by letter. She's probably twelve or thirteen. And she looks up at me, and I look up at her, and she smiles, and you can see the light in her eyes: she's not stupid, she's actually smart and friendly, she's beautiful, she just can't read all that well. And after a second she realizes what's going on here, and she looks down, and her cheeks turn red, because what's in my eyes isn't friendliness. It's shame. My face gets hot when I think about it, more than twenty years later. I never told my mom about it, but I cried all the way home, and she didn't question me when I said we weren't ever going back to that library again. There were other libraries, it's a big city. I still kind of hate myself for that one.
So you've got a mother of three, and what's in her eyes, when she describes the indescribable feeling of asking her own daughter what the words on the page mean. And what's in her eyes when she tells what it was like, to see her daughter read a whole page aloud, for the first time. "If you were a mother you would understand...of knowing..." She breaks off; the enormity of the future that her children contain. It's too big for her; it's too big for any of us. In Kentucky they still know the word for "hope," because they need it. Her three children talk about the books they love: science, nonfiction. The youngest one, a cute kid, a boy who must be saved, so that he can become a man: "My favorite book is The Chronicles Of Narnia, by C.S. Lewis, because it's interesting." To have dreams in Kentucky. You're not alone. Onstage, Ryan calls Paula short, and it's a comparison I've never seen before: she's astoundingly short. She takes a second, then spits out some kind of kitchen fridge joke about being "vertically challenged." The challenges of Paula Abdul: number them.
Pimpmercial: "Crazy Little Thing Called Love." Hate the song, Blake is sexy driving a car, Phil is gross, the cars are -- as usual -- magic, they go to that little chapel in El Paso where the Bride rose again and went after Bill, all the girls are dressed awfully badly, like sausage people, and then...things...start to happen. This is the Clockwork Orange part; I don't know what it is about it, because it's a pretty simple, like comically simple, concept, but for some reason I felt like I was being brainwashed or something. Turned inside out. There's a cheesy disco backdrop in front of which various celebrities lipsynch to "Stayin' Alive." This is in the middle of the pimpmercial, by the way, just a break in the system for some crazy, like a secret scary Cadbury egg. So there's Keira Knightly, looking like the loveliest lollipop in the bunch; the remains of Teri Hatcher with that amusing costume still on, Rob Lowe with something up his ass, Goldie Hawn with no idea what's going on, a sports person, Ross Gellar needing a punch to the gut. My wonderful Gwyneth without any ability to be herself, ever, just born without it, that thing that makes you who you are at rest. Sprightly House, Helena Bonham Carter scaring me to death like she always does, Hugh Grant like a weeping pustule, MY SOUL SISTER SARAH MICHELLE GELLAR, some guy, Dr. Phil douchin' up the place, Ryan looking ill at ease, Helen Mirren (?!?), Twiggy, the Blue Man Group with a video screen of Miss Piggy. Somewhere between Helen Mirren and the Blue Man Group, I think, is where I went crazy. You can only scream "WHY?" a certain number of times before it stops meaning anything. Marc Antony and his saline drip, Chris Kattan and Lisa Kudrow, a pair that is not right. American Pie guy, Mickey Dolenz, okay, Paul Ruebens or possibly Kattan again. Kirstie Alley dressed as a priest. Some girl, possibly Dushku, I think Michael Bublé, Teri Hatcher/Ryan Seacrest/Teri Hatcher in a blitzkrieg of awkwardness; Helen Mirren, Kevin Bacon's ungodly ass, a hot chubby man I recognize, and Sum 41 or whatever, Good Charlotte, Benji and his brother, whatever they are called. Rob Schneider looking better than he's ever looked, a MILF that might be Goldie again, Ross and Phoebe having zero chemistry, GILLIAN ANDERSON for some reason, more Twiggy and Dr. Phil, Dawn from the UK Office, Miss Piggy some more. I mean...these are my notes: "What the fuck this is INSANE this cost FIVE DOLLARS I made this when I was a small child so fucked up and it's COMING FROM INSIDE THE PIMPMERCIAL." And then the pimpmercial is over too. I just shook on the couch for like ten minutes with the cold sweats.
"Phil, please stand..." And leave! And leave! And leave! He smiles so bucktoothed retardedly that Ryan's like, "Why are you smiling?" in this deathly tone. His horrible self-satisfaction, it is chilling. It burns. He has no answer, he's like, "I just love you, man." Ryan swallows some throwup and tells him to sit down, he's safe.
This part's rough, but luckily it's also twice as intense as before. Back to Africa, where Ryan and Simon are visiting a family that sleeps fourteen people in a "house" that's about the size of a tent. Three of the kids are Emily's; the rest are AIDS orphans. When it's time to go to sleep, they lie down, all in a row, on the floor, and she covers them with the blankets she's got. Three of them are HIV positive. In another house, there's Emma, who was doing well when Simon and Ryan first met her, but has sharply declined. She lies face-down on her bed, unable to speak or move. Simon starts to cry, in the heat and the smell of it, and begins to storm around. "This is not the right place for her." He completely breaks down, like, he can't handle it all. I never wanted to see him lose control. He leans against a wall and stares out into space. "It's just...wrong." Ryan's speechless, his whole body like a sounding board, like a tuning fork. Simon heads outside and drops himself onto a stone wall, weeping, almost ignoring the camera altogether. I mean to say that he runs outside, and throws himself down, because he can't handle it in there. With Emma and death in that tiny room. Ryan watches him cry; can't meet the camera. Then there's Ruth, twenty-eight years old, two kids, skinny as shit. Skin stretched across her cheekbones. She would have been beautiful once. She looks twice her age. Simon orders her out and into the truck; follows behind a man carrying her outside in his arms. She looks like she could just blow away, or crumble; he holds her tenderly. There's nothing in her eyes. They get her placed gently in the truck, Simon and Ryan with their hands on their hips, staring at each other and not seeing each other. "Would she...be more comfortable ... lying down? Or sitting." Simon's eyes dart from Ruth, to the man, to Ryan. Nobody's answering. Nobody knows. Ruth died two days later. Ryan and Simon stand in a tent city in Africa, shaking under the sun, full of enormity. All over Africa there are projects, pills and food and AVR cocktails; all over Africa there are mothers, like Ruth and Emma and Emily, getting sick and getting better, getting sick and dying. "We just have to get there in time."
Ellen's standing on the Walt Disney stage, overwhelmed, armed just with the cold equations. 30 bucks is ten lives saved with ARV drugs. "There are a lot of rich people that watch this show," she says: she knows because they watch it with her, at her house. She challenges them to meet her pledge, $100,000. "This is ridiculous. We can do something," she chokes. There are certain celebrities that don't have the faculties to be fake about this shit. There are certain people you have to believe. Even though this thing is imperfect in a lot of ways, there are more ways in which it does mean something, even if it's something different from what they think it means. I saw Ryan Seacrest, and Simon Cowell, and Ellen Degeneres, overcome by horror. When you see a spider, or a snake, or anything beastly, and your skin starts moving before the rest of you, that's the arachnid reaction. That's your body saying No, as loudly as it can. This is what it looks like: Ryan shaking and Simon crying and Ellen Degeneres, introducing motherfuck Josh Groban -- "as if it weren't emotional enough" -- singing that one song he knows, backed by the African Children's Choir. And amazingly enough, it sounds exactly the same as always, but with kids singing jacked up on top of it. I don't mind the song, it's like the one song like this that I don't totally hate, but still: miles to go before we sleep, and all that. Bleep-bloop.
Commercial, and then meet Lori and Edson, from ExxonMobil and Esso Angola. They're both black, that's important. What's more important is the straight faces with which they accept the applause of the ignorant and callow for their donations. For offering a Band-Aid to the cancer patient they've made of the world. ExxonMobil is a major funder of global warming denial organizations: the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the George C. Marshall Institute, the Heartland Institute, Congress on Racial Equality, TechCentralStation.com, and the International Policy Network. A report in 2007 found nearly $16 million between 1998 and 2005, funneled "to a network of 43 advocacy organizations that seek to confuse the public on global warming science." Their disinformation tactics are analogous to those used by Big Tobacco to deny links between smoking and cancer, even using the same organizations and personnel. A 1998 internal ExxonMobil strategy memo states: "Victory will be achieved when uncertainties in climate science become part of the conventional wisdom" for "average citizens" and "the media." Are we there yet? ExxonMobil funded the Santos regime in Angola -- hi, Edson! -- and engaged in illegal trade with Sudan, eventually settling in 2003 with the US government for $50,000. That same year, James Giffen was indictedfor bribing Kazakhstan's President Nazarbayev with $78 million to help ExxonMobil win a 25 percent share of the Tengiz oilfield, the third largest in the world. A month later, J. Bryan Williams came down for tax charges related to this deal -- that's what Syriana was about. Williams got nearly four years in prison for tax evasion on over $7 million in unreported income, including a $2 million kickback for the Kazakhstan deal, and other bribes. All of which is tacky, but here's where it gets good. For over five years, ExxonMobil's been under fire for their bullshit in Indonesia, where they contracted with the Indonesian military like fucking thugs to protect their interests: murder and rape, forced relocations of thousands of people, all with the fulcrum point that the government needed all the help it could get, due to the civil war happening. The relationship goes back to 1992 and they're still denying it. Murder, rape and a trail of tears, to protect a fucking pipeline. And these dicks have the nerve to show up and smile.
Julia Roberts has been to five funerals. Keira's had two. Helen's had two, her mom and her dad. She's an orphan too. Gwyneth has quite publicly lost both grandfathers and her dad, and a cousin. Tom Cruise has been to eleven funerals -- I didn't even know he was allowed to show up at these things anymore! Kevin Bacon's seen six; Matt Damon's had seven, DAUGHTRY if you care had four. But here's a man in Africa who's dealt with 280. How long before they blend together? How many names do you promise to remember before you start forgetting them? When does death become part of your personal emotional overhead? Why is that a question we can ask? A lot of those 280 were kids: is that better or worse? Malaria kills a child every 30 seconds. They meet a woman with a baby that doesn't look too good, and then it dies. $2 can buy enough meds to save four kids from the senseless fucking death of malaria; all it takes is mosquito nets and cheap pills. Ellen tells the kids to have their parents contribute nine dollars to every single they can scrounge up. I think Ellen would be a good mom, that's a really neat idea in like five different ways. That ten bucks -- if that's nothing to a parent and huge to a little kid, how unbelievable an amount is that to somebody outside our country? I spend more than that on coffee in three days -- that's twenty kids on a vector with death, saved. What's more important, to save the world? Or to change it? One of them is possible and one of them isn't. One of them you can work on every second of the day.
Kelly Clarkson sings "Up To The Mountain" with Jeff Beck, and her hippy hair looks really good, but she's wearing this strange Mama Cass dress that takes her um, healthy fullness, and accentuates all the way into straight up weirdness. I don't know the song that well, and I don't have it in me to appreciate the clearly skillful way in which Jeff Beck plays whatever that instrument is, but I do like Kelly Clarkson an awful lot. Patty Griffin, whom I only remember because Kelly loves her, sang this song. And apparently the song is about Martin Luther King and not Chairman Mao, like I thought. Who knows how I got there, frankly.
After a commercial, Ben Stiller persists in singing and cracking his own shit up, and then a short cartoon about Simon as an American Idol contestant within the Simpsons, who are the judges. Marge is Randy, and throws some gang signs awkwardly, but not as awkwardly as if it were Randy. Simon sings that song about your boyfriend, and whether or not you wish he were like Simon (yes indeedy), and Homer/Simon tells him, "Lose the accent, Mary Poppins! This is American Idol!" The crowd cheers grossly at that one. Marge calls him "Dawg" and a liar, and Lisa/Paula drunkenly careens about, yelling about dogs and going "WOO!" That was the one funny part. They drop him down a trapdoor and Bart/Ryan is all, "The lions haven't eaten this well since Dunkelman." Aw, respect. Moment of silence. So them Ryan's like, "Simon's been waiting months to do that song, doncha know. Ever since he made me a man in Africa." Bill and Melinda are added to the list of corporate interests that need good PR this week. They immediately build thirteen security faults into the charity, twelve DRMs, eleven kludgy errors, ten meaningless messages, nine secret "messaging" systems, eight redundant processor-devouring subroutines, seven cross-platform translation issues, six useless patches a week, five golden customer-service hoops you get to jump through, and four months until it becomes obsolete and Idol has to give back in a whole new operating system or become irrelevant altogether, but all they keep saying is, "Isn't it pretty? Tell me I'm prettier than Apple! TELL ME I'M PRETTIER THAN FUCKING APPLE!" Suri and Shiloh are like, "Trust me, you're covered."
So Doolittle, Blake, and Phil are already safe, damn his eyes. "LaKisha, how are you?" She nods sadly and smiles: "I'm fine." Also safe. She really did think she was going! Aww. Wait, no. Fuck that. No sympathy tonight. If they send my Jordin home I am going to mess a motherfucker up! Randy starts talking about a very emotional program dealing with kids that have issues of some kind, but I can't deal with any more of that right now. I just hit my limit. He throws a football around with a kid, kind of emotionally not that invested in it, but you can tell he likes kids. I just mostly worried about Jordin at this point. Ryan tells us the actual names of the charities, like we finally have clearance: Save The Children, Boys & Girls Clubs of America, The Children's Health Fund, and America's Second Harvest. Good people, for the most part. Less good: the most fucked up thing yet, coming up now.
The first time I saw this I was so numb and freaked out and hurting and laughing kind of hysterically that I didn't even register it. I was like, "Huh. Moving on..." It wasn't until like two days ago that it finally hit me and I was like THE FUCK? So what's going on now is "a duet you thought was impossible," and if you're thinking Ghoulish Natalie Cole Singing With Her Dead Father For Cash, you're in the right area, but even so you are not ready for this jelly. They stick Celine Dion in a time machine, okay, back to 1968, and she sings a duet with ELVIS. On the American Idol stage. It looks like 1968 footage, it's totally bizarre. The questions are as follows: "Why?" "What?" "How?" and "Why?" Ryan offers to explain it later to a confused little girl, but how do you explain something like that? Who thinks this is a good idea? I don't even know what song they were singing, because all I could hear inside my head were like lunatic ravings. Ryan dares you to download that shit for yourself and calls it "pretty...pretty cool." It was pretty fucking effed up, actually.
Then here comes dumb old Madonna looking like a hag with a message from the country of Better Than You. She's in Malawi, possibly, and she's like, "I'm stealing this baby right now. Just 'cuz I can." She's surrounded by kids who are, if this is possible, even more bored than she is. "What you probably don't know is that these kids have AIDS," she says, which is offensive because Madge, while you were off doing whatever the fuck it is you do now instead of being relevant or making music, the rest of us actually did hear about the AIDS epidemic. They've got newspapers and things now, and you're allowed to read them without regard to how much red-bracelet clearance you have. "And if they don't get medicine, they will die. So just send them some money, and then they won't die!" She says brightly, and squeezes one of them with a hard, dead, fake smile. Madonna, suck my total cock. Where did you go? Why couldn't you have stayed there? Or gotten better again?
Live, Ryan tells us they're already at $30 million, including all those corporate donations and the live pledges. And though we've been rushed all over the place this whole time to see all the horrible things that ever existed, we still have time for the fucking Idol Challenge. I will never understand why I hate the Idol Challenge so much. They have the exact same thing on The Apprentice and I so never cared, but the Idol Challenge is just hugely offensive to me. This week's question is, "Who sang the final song in last year's Season Five finale?" The choices are Scrunched-Up Elliott, Gimped-Out Taylor and Lactating Kat. So basically the question is, "Who won last year?" But worded like carefully. This show is a mystery wrapped in an enigma and then batter-fried to golden perfection.
There's some more technical issue-having, some girl screaming at Ryan, who's babbling, and then Simon says something snotty to Ryan, who's all, "It's called the vamp, Simon." And away we go! A little soft-shoe wouldn't go amiss at that point, you kid. Simon's like, "I'm not having a conversation with you, I'm letting you dangle in your awkward moment." Ellen pipes up over the simulink about "I'm vamping also, Ryan." That was the funniest moment of the entire thing. Over at the Concert Hall, Ellen's like, "Don't be impressed by thirty million, that's nothing. That's bullshit. And you're left out of it anyway." I like her approach. Now, "the amazing" Annie Lennox. Who has always looked like she's transitioning, and only more so as she ages. I think that's why I liked her drag queen era best. Whenever I see Annie Lennox it always reminds me of that awful, awful tag on Will & Grace where Grace was like leaving a room full of memories or some shit, and that song started playing all loud, and Grace had like a bunch of feelings and then softly closed the door behind her. It was like, I always liked about the Will & Grace program how they would go all Cosby on your ass and make you feel feelings at the last second, and this was like the awkward phase when they were still working that chemistry out, but it was just so cheesy and offensive. I still like that song, though. So anyway, Annie Lennox plays "Bridge Over Troubled Water," and I didn't know she was this good on the piano, but her voice is just the same amount of awesome as usual. I can never figure out if she's super tall, or really tiny, like everybody else on TV. She stands up and sings into the mic, and a guy takes over at the piano, and just in case you were going to get a sec, there's a bunch of video of her having African fun on the screen, and then a billion really intense Africans thanking us intensely, and more licking the sponsors from Seacrest, and then Rob Schneider looking weirdly attractive. He's doing something that is working, and I don't like it. He introduces himself as Adam Sandler and asks for money.
Not the bottom two, just the two in most need of votes: "Chris, you sang 'Change The World' entirely through your nose; Jordin, you sang 'You'll Never Walk Alone,' and you rode it like a pony." This whole time, also, Ryan's been saying how SHOCKING the eliminations are going to be, I forgot to tell you that. So then he tells Chris he's safe, after 70 million total votes by America -- guess that last 20 million just wasn't worth the cash -- and Jordin about dies. He's like, "I told you this was going to be shocking!" The audience starts committing suicide all over the place and screaming and tearing out their hair, and then he's like, "Jordin! You are also safe!" I almost fell over. How much of this show are you supposed to take? Did you feel at all battered watching this show? Because it's like, "Give me a sec, please. I feel like a kid up past his bedtime, going nuts." Everybody's happy, the judges are gleaming, huge cuddle party onstage, and Ryan levels that the votes this week and will be combined, and the bottom two are out. "We couldn't eliminate anybody on a charity night!" Over in the stands, which we're not meant to see, Jordin snaps a tissue right the fuck out of LaKisha's hands, and it is seemingly a nasty little moment, but it's kind of a blur so who knows.
Later, the "mentor" finally shows up, at the opposite end of the week from where he was supposed to be, as the Idols sing some song called "American Prayer," and Bono comes lurking out of the shadows, and everybody on earth starts screaming their stupid asses off. Bono instructs them that the world is full of a-holes who don't believe that my generation will be the one to end brutal war and stupid poverty, and want nothing better than to see us fail, like they did, over and over again. Bono tells them what I keep trying to, which is that they are liars. He says that his whole ONE thing that nobody actually understands is somehow going to do these things, because the power of ONE is expressed by the snow coming down in June and the sun going round the moon and "Irish rock stars" showing up on American Idol, and the sheer naïveté of that statement and the way he makes it, like he has so much oooozing diiiiignity that it's fucked up that heeeeeeee would even be on the same cooooontinent as this show. The kids don't seem to understand the bullshit he just talked to them. Melinda asks him about the "defining moment" that "lit the fire" for him, and I bet you ten bucks there's going to be orphanages or some kind of Tibetan temple or something. And there is, he's like, "I was working in an orphanage, and this man was like, Please take my son with you when you get bored of our shitty lives and go back to yours, because if you don't he will surely die, because it is balls-out horrible in Africa." So what happened? "I didn't take him. But I have, in other ways." YOU WHAT? I hate Bono so much. "I left him to die, but in another way I didn't. I assume that he died, but I don't know for sure. The important thing is that I didn't save him, and am thus a hero." He reiterates that their generation's ability to accomplish the impossible is stronger than all the fucked up parents and schoolteachers in the whole world, which I'm loving that whole train of thought or course, and asks them to remember, like he failed to do, the people whose lives they are changing. Bono looks really good right now, like he finally grew back into his face. His lack of perspective lends him a healthy glow. He's all, "There's nothing better than being on stage...except for saving a life." What a barfy-ass way to end things. In a way it's kind of perfect: the apples and oranges that is the entire raison for this freakout hellride, in one sentence: "Being onstage and saving lives: two concepts that couldn't be less related to each other, connected by an ellipsis."
Then they group-sing "American Prayer" with a reverent kind of staring down, and the usual technical proficiency from everybody but Chris, the usual emotional hailstorm from Jordin and Phil, and I don't know this song and by God I hate Jim Morrison, but how awesome would it be if they sang that one instead? "Decry the metal fox! Grip me like a friendly hand!"
So. We made it through that one together. I don't really know if I have any thoughts beyond what I already said. I honestly don't have many thoughts left, period. That shit will take it out of you. I don't know how they expected to be received, but that was an unholy mess. It was kind of awesome but in a different way than the awesome that this show is capable of being usually. Like, remember Teri Hatcher looking like a barfly? That was in this recap, and Keira Knightly starving in a non-African kind of way, and the very sad and kind of mindblowingly raw stuff with Africa being kind of a shithole. I guess the point is that anybody who's willing to try deserves a smile at least, but there's something really untoward about high-fiving your corporate buddies over the bodies of their victims. I think that there's probably no amount of money that you can throw at a problem when the problem is endemic to the system, so the whole thing is kind of silly, but that money also has real effects and saves real lives. It's the status quo that's the problem, really, and I don't think we've figured how to deal with that one yet. If your house is built on sand, it doesn't really matter how much food you've got on the table. Not to the house, anyway. But you still need food on the table, no matter what's going on. I think that if you're feeding your family, which is what we're being asked to do, the least you can do is call it that, and not go on some messianic pitch about how you're fixing the house. You're not fixing the house, you're living in it. We're all living in it. And if you're talking about global misappropriation of funds, and we are, then it seems kind of silly to draw lines in the palimpsest of all that pain, because you're just confusing the issue. Today we'll save some of these people, and tomorrow we'll go save those people, but we'll never really have the chance to save everybody, because that goes against the interests of the companies that provide the house in the first place. The human tendency to oversimplify, whether it's because it's too painful or just too confusing to think about.
You draw a line around yourself, and that's what you're responsible for. You have a kid, or get married, and the circle gets wider. But the personal isn't political: that's messiah talk. The political isn't a faceless force, it's a palimpsest of faces, it's only ever made up of all the little personal circles in the world, which is the opposite. If this is the only time in the year that these things matter, if this is your Valentine to the world, then you haven't increased the circumference of that circle: you're just tossing money out over it, so the pain will go away. Which is helpful, but not optimal. There's so much ego in activism, just as there is in any activity that you learn to substitute for your actual, complex, unique identity. You cut things off and blow other ones out of proportion, in order to get something you thought you needed. Nobody ever acted in anything but self-interest, martyrs most of all. And thank God for them, I suppose, because they move things and they make things happen. But that's not an indictment of activism, that's an indictment of the need to draw those lines through and around yourself to begin with. A pet cause is just that: an accessory, a teacup terrier that's prettier than somebody else's. You cut yourself off and dedicate to a cause, and end up more alone, with less joy, because you thought pain was something you could quantify. Something you could solve. Gay rights are a subset of feminism, and feminism a subset of humanism, and humanism leads up into joy: but setting aside a day a week or a month or a year in order to work on that problem, that's not really my favorite concept. You can't save the world, it never needed saving. But you can change it, by being first and foremost a force for good, by taking yourself apart and putting yourself back together better. By always rising. By taking your position -- Irish rockstar, television personality, website writer; accountant, lawyer, stay-at-home mom -- and working to get your voice heard, as a person, as a force for good that values compassion above all, over partisan, polarized, divisive screaming fights that solve nothing; that only reinforce the stupid division. It's not that they're right and we're wrong, it's that we're both asking the wrong questions.
Every movement that ever worked came from civil movements, from compassion, from working smarter and not harder, from working every day with your hands to build a better future for everybody, not just people like you. Every movement that ever backlashed came from thinking your shouts outweighed everybody else -- that your pain was louder or stronger or more worthy of being satisfied, just because it was yours. Every war that ever happened came from a simple trick of memory: that any amount of difference could ever outweigh the things we have in common. Everything that bridges that gap is just a process of remembering to bridge the gap; to remind the people around you that it doesn't exist. To remember the possibility of joy. Every bit of pain that ever happened to anybody in the world resulted from just this: the sin, the cancer, the awful confusion and heavy responsibility of ever thinking you were alone. You aren't. You never were.