thoughts on AF-RI-CA, can uOOO ::feel::IT?

The Vanity Fair Africa issue raises an issue that I have had since the product(RED) surfaced, why is Bono the ambassador to all things African. I understand that he has spearheaded the African AIDS effort and that he has raised large amounts of money and awareness for AIDS in Africa, but how is it that Bono, the guest-editor, makes anything on Vanity Fair more valid. To start he is not African, therefore I would be hardpressed to consider him any sort of authority to what is genuinely African. He does not have the knowledge base, in my mind, to desiminate which of the articles and images produced by Vanity Fair for its Africa issue are value and which are not. To make matters worse, he is not an editor, he is a musician. In light of this, he is doubly out of his league. But yet, in big bold letters, we, the readers, are assured that everything in the Africa issue is tip-top because Bono said so. I cannot even read through his editor’s letter and believe that he even wrote all of that himself. It is one thing to be a philanthropist or an avid supporter of a cause, but that does not give you authority. I am biased because I am a student, at a top academic institution at that, which means that my judgement of authority is skewed by academia, but is he not given authority in the eyes of others simply because they are not scrutinizing enough?

Kate Moss’s ad works only because it plays into the images that Americans want to portray of themselves. It appeals first to the universality of the African cause. Kate Moss can dress in near blackface because it is “not a fashion statement”, it is a statement about life and the need to help all peoples. The fact that half the proceeds of the issue go to aid in Africa plays into the need for self validation that all Americans grow up with. The statement works because of how America works. Americans are able to be lazy and complacent, do the things that they would normally do, like buy this issue and receive a free poster on top of it, while “helping” Africa. They do not want to go to Africa and volunteer or put the agency of the help in the hands of Africans, they want Kate Moss and Bono to be their links, so they never come in contact with the other. In this sense, it works in the same what American interaction with the homeless works. Giving homeless money to use themselves is an iffy idea at best, but let someone not homeless come along and say they are gonna help the homeless then you are golden.
When Sut Jhally claims that “the marketplace cannot directly offer the real thing, but it can offer visions of it connected with the purchase of products”, he speaks directly to the desires of the American public. Americans do not want to go to Africa, they do not want to be in the trenches of global crisis; they want to be “aware” of the problem without knowing the problem itself. The reason why the images of Product(RED) are positive and blanketing is because actual problem is not marketable. The American public would love to be fashionable and flash there awareness through the tool of their new Product(RED) AmEx, but they would not want the card if it actually had images of dying children on it. The American populous strives, in the everyday, to gain validity against their follow citizens, they want to feel good about themselves because they are doing the right thing. Product(RED) plays into that by giving the world the visions of African being helped by your purchase of products. If Product(RED) set out to inform about Africa, its face would be completely different. Images of a universal(RED) Africa would not suffice, true atrocity would have to be brought to the surface. But that is not appealing to the consumer.