Starry-Eyed Saviors

Celebrities Are Rallying the People for a Good Cause. But to What Effect?

The poor will be with us always. And so, it seems, will the pop stars who plug in their guitars in hopes of subduing poverty and a host of other human miseries. Over the years, as they rocked, the fans gave: to Bangladesh, to African famine relief, to American farmers, to fight AIDS and apartheid, to end torture, to rebuild from calamities.

Funds were raised. Awareness was raised. People felt good (though it's somewhat painful now to see clips of Bono and the Edge sporting mullets at Live Aid 20 years ago). And maybe it all mattered.

Now Bob Geldof, the patron saint of cause-rock, is back, teamed with fellow big-hearted Irishman Bono and British screenwriter Richard Curtis ("Bridget Jones's Diary"), to promote Live 8, billed as the largest collective concert in history. Free shows commence tomorrow in 10 cities on four continents.

But send no money now: Geldof and company aren't working for charity but instead to goad the leaders of privileged nations into doing more to wipe out extreme poverty and disease in Africa. It's a campaign everyone can get behind -- who, after all, is happy that 30,000 kids die every day worldwide because of poverty? Celebrities can pour their hopes for a better world into the cause -- no more hunger, no more AIDS -- and also weigh in on the vital importance of African debt cancellation. (Debt relief: It's the new rain forest!)

MTV will give itself over to the occasion; AOL will stream everything live onto the Internet. Curtis's new HBO movie, "The Girl in the Cafe," will be on the air in 20 nations. It's a comic romance set, improbably, at a G-8 summit, where a persistent young woman hectors British leaders into making heroic proposals to help the world's poor: "We can't allow this casual holocaust to take place on our watch," says a character portraying Britain's chancellor of the exchequer.

The pop-culture campaigners are rallying around a slogan: "Make Poverty History." The push is on because next week, at a golf resort in Scotland, the most powerful leaders in the industrialized world will convene as the Group of Eight.

Live 8 organizers believe that intense celebrity summitry will help shape the agenda. "We're not [bleeping] around here," Sir Bob, who was knighted in 1985, said in an interview from London this week, during which he alternately lobbied President Bush ("Wouldn't it be amazing if America would rescue Africa?") and cursed skeptics who question whether anything will change after the final notes fade.

"We're not 'raising awareness,' '' he said defensively. "We're driving political policy. It's about writing and implementing political policy toward the poorest people in the world."

As for naysayers: "They can say what they [bleeping] like, it's working. Nay away into the wilderness! It's to accept the culture of defeat."

Many consumers of mass culture -- say, the kids flocking to Philly to hear Destiny's Child or Linkin Park -- won't know, or care, that the G-8 is a tedious affair where Bush, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and heads of state from Germany, France, Italy, Russia, Japan and Canada will debate debt relief, foreign aid, trade policy and suchlike. The scripts for summits are generally written in advance, say those who've attended.

We know Bush's position going in: "New resources are not enough," he said yesterday in a speech on Africa. "Our greatest challenge is to get beyond empty symbolism and discredited policies, and match our good intentions with good results. . . . Economic aid that expects little will achieve little."

The president also said: "Under the African Growth and Opportunity Act, which has reduced barriers to trade, U.S. exports to sub-Sahara Africa increased 25 percent last year. And America's imports from AGOA countries rose 88 percent. Now we must take the next large step: expanding the entire global trading system through the Doha negotiations."