Saturday, July 7, 2007
Live Earth
Live Earth, the spectacle for The Good — what could be more important than “saving the earth” — is running full steam now with Madonna belting out a 70s sounding song accompanied by robo-dancers whose tired choreography was just short of self-satire; this was preceded by a 60s sounding duo singing a song that had been better done eons ago. Those two acts aren't likely to save much of anything.
If this concert, an aggregate of stardom and technology, which is pretty much a summing up of popular culture, amounts to something more than an entertainment extravaganza I'd be surprised. It does however make evident the formulas of the current music scene foisted on us by the entertainment industry, useful in an educational sense, if you like parsing formulas about shifts in the Sargasso Sea of pop music.
The most amusing part of course is witnessing the self-important seriousness of indulged celebrities, who in full view of the public, wildly consume more than their share of just about everything, lecturing us on eco-goodness with what often appears to be a challenged intelligence. If you are going to save something you've got to have your preachers though, and those preachers, lordee, are our celebs — our household gods.
I remember both astronomer Alex Filippenko on a Berkeley podcast, and physicist Richard Muller also a Berkeley podcaster, stating a more cautious assessment than the “absolute certainty” of global warming offered by Al Gore. (Gore actually visited Filippenko.) In each of these scientists' estimate global warming has about a 30% chance of being an accurate assessment of current climatological trends. Not enough historical data seems to be the problem; along with our current inability to grasp chaos systems.
Both scientists of course said that we should do something because it would be foolish not to — too much at stake.