The battle outside is raging - Time for a European Spring?

Lady Gaga and the Promise of a better World

Remember, in 1985 Michael Jackson and Lional Richie wrote a charity song for Ethiopia. The Single earned four times platinum. Now, more than two decades later Ethiopians are still starving and half of the artists that worked on the single in the 80s are either out of business, dead or drugged out of their minds. Eric Clepton, too, sang about it. And on Amazon you can buy an entire book, 97 pages filled with the philosophical wisdom of Roman Espejo, trying to find an answer to the question “Can celebrities change the world?”.

Only last week Lady Gaga, who was recently harshly criticised for her cavalier attitude towards taking drugs, had her moment of inspirational bravery, when she posted a photo of her scantly clad self online, to launch her Born This Way Foundation, battling media distorted images of anorexic Hollywood beauties. And like Prince Harry’s fans saluting naked to “support the brawdy royal” this past summer, many Gaga supporters uploaded a flood of equally brave pictures, supporting their star by depicting the flaws in the human body as a study in the perfection of imperfection. Lady Gaga is changing the world, making it a better place, while sitting comfortably in her million dollar home, tweeting, girls should not let themselves be pressured by the size zero obsession. Even Karl Lagerfeld found Beth Ditto inspirational, but when it comes to presenting his newest Channel collections at the Prêt-à-Porter Shows Paris, the models on his catwalk looked more like walking sticks than the voluptuous women in Rubens paintings.

Yet, the question remains who is changing the world? Our brave political leaders always trying, sometimes failing, to contain the next crisis? The entertainment industry, the revolutionary youth uprisings, the demonstrators on Wall Street or your average dude and his community project? 

            Let’s start of with the politicians. If you take a closer look at the How to become a democratically elected representative? guide book, it clearly states, you need to start working on your rhetoric in order to convince people. The guys who invented democracy in Ancient Greece more than 2000 years ago, thought a well-structured discourse was the expression of a well-structured and consequently well-governed mind. Of course in modern day politics there is always the exception to the rule, the former Bavarian Minister President Edmund Stoiber is famous for fudging his way through any public comment he was asked to make. The accumulated wealth of what the German Magazine Der Spiegel called ‘Rumpelreden’ (German neologism compound noun: Verb rumpeln = to rumple, to trundle or to lumber + noun/ plural Reden = discourses, speeches) inspired a great many of web-pages to comment, warranting even an articles in serious newspapers.Yet, Stoiber is an excellent example of a lifetime politician, starring in his most beloved role as Bavarian super politician and Minister President from 1993 till 2003. In the US you also need a big check book or well-meaning donors.

Today politicians have it relatively easy, were it not for the bankers and the bail out programs, with YouTube and Twitter, mobile phones and social networking sites dictators can be overthrown without begging the US government for troops and weapons to police the world, consequently raising the national debt ceiling into the stratosphere. Mubarak (Egypt) is gone along with Gaddafi (Lybia), Salih (Jemen), Ben Ali (Tunis), Saddam is long since dead and Osama bin Laden was killed while the Nobel Peace Prize winner President Obama had front row seats. So internationally all should be well, granted Assad his hanging onto his seat like a bulldog, but people are openly speculating about a world post-Arab spring uprisings and the consolidation of the newly risen democratic structures in the Middle East. Some might call that celebrating prematurely, with the Euro crisis and punches coming from left, right and centre. 

                   In Spain, France, Italy and Greece people are protesting against the austerity measures and the shackles of the new ESP fund which forces our great (multiplied by the factor n) grand-children to pay for our stupidity, but we continue to fund the banks with tax money injections while keeping our fingers crossed that the market will regulate itself. They clearly did not learn their lesson from the Lehman disaster way back in the day, risking systematic failure because former the Goldman Sachs employe Henry Paulson wanted to teach his former buddy from Wall Street Dick Fuld a lesson in humility and moral hazard. The Euro crisis is ubiquitous. Politicians have been talking and touring the EU for months and months trying to save the sinking ship while the voters are fed up with their elected representatives, complaining loudly and sometimes violently int he streets. And you know IT penetrated your little bubble, when your seven year old nephew asks you innocently what ESP means. For a news channel protesters are only part of the story, to make it newsworthy there needs to be an emotional component and the good Samaritans in the German news stations report on experts, estimating how many lives of patients the health care cuts in Greece will cost, subtly insisting in Greece handicapped who were forced to stay invisible, now in an act of bravery go public. After the experts there, the personal tale of misery, caused by the austerity measures dictated by the EU and Merkel, underlies the seriousness of the situation making the story not only newsworthy but also more accessible for the average Tagesschau viewer. 15 minutes afterwards those very same news channels either broadcast history documentaries about World War I and II or entertain with pseudo-documentaries about apocalyptic scenarios and the end of humanity, playing on the basic human emotions of guilt and fear.

Forbes in 2007 searched for the 15 people most influential people who have changed the world, hopefully for the better. Oddly enough there is only one politician on the list, and its not Gandhi. Of course everyone knows George Lucas, A long time ago in a far way galaxy in 1975 “redefined the [film]industry”, but next to the very prominent filmmakers who bedazzled billions of viewers with intergalactic spaceships, is Michail Gorbachev for ending communism, at least in Russia, Cuba and North Korea don’t really matter on a global schema now, don’t they?Yet, there are also less well-known names on that list. How many of your average Fox news watching, the Sun reading, Bild Zeitung zealots really know who Malcom McLean is? He invented the shipping container. Again NCIS has 20 Million viewers each Tuesday night, watching Abby Sciuto working her magic with the DNA fingerprinting, but how many of those could actually name at least one of the two Nobel prize winning Cambridge researchers who uncovered “the secret of life”? Watson and Crick used x-ray data to find the double helix structure of the Desoxyribose Nucleic Acid.The list goes on, adding the free market economist Milton Friedman, Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce for the invention of the microchip, Paul Lauterbur and Peter Mansfield (Magnetic Resonance Imaging short MRI), Malcolm McLean (the shipping container), Gregory Pincus, M.C. Chang and John Rock (the birth control pill effectively ending the baby boom which makes them responsible for the demographic problems in Germany, where the average birth rate today is 1,4 children/ woman) and last but not least Tim Berners-Lee (the World Wide Web facilitating revolutions all over the globe). Brave New World, where people believe in things because they have been conditioned to. Now, that list varies, depending on who you ask. Between Britain’s (insert name of any country from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe) got talent and … Next Top Model, the viral disease of the casting show bug has also infiltrated serious news broadcasting channels. CNN did a special on everyday heroes, where viewers could vote for their favourite champion for children, protection of the powerless and the community, making the everyday hero not only the nominee of an election process but turning the viewer into participant in the democratic process forcing him to exercise his right to vote alongside the freedom of speech and opinion.

Clearly politicians this side of the Atlantic did learn nothing from their US colleagues about capturing an audience. Even the campaign trail could can become a theatrical spectacle with the right equipment and speech writers. Last time the German chancellor was elected in 2009 only 70.9 % of those that are actually allowed to vote (18 years and older) exercised their democratic right, thus reaching an all time low since the end of World War II and the establishment of the second German democracy in 1949. 

             So if it's not the might of the politicians, they can concentrate on their next campaigns and the image in the media, while the celebrities take care of the rest, traveling to Cambodia, adopting a passel of kids from all over like Josephine Baker.