...media would only report the facts not opinions.
Clooney, Jolie personify inequality in the world
By MICHAEL COREN, QMI Agency
Canadians are a generous and compassionate people. Just like the British, Australians and Europeans. Even as generous as Americans who, in spite of what some of their neighbours would like to believe, are some of the most giving people in human history.
Private campaigns in these countries raise enormous amounts of money for numerous causes and tragedies and all of these societies, including the U.S., donate large chunks of their tax revenue to help foreigners in need. It’s worth remembering this each time someone beats up on our culture and way of life.
It’s worth contrasting, too, with certain wealthy states that do relatively little for others and even for their own people. Such as the Gulf states and Saudi Arabia, where foreign aid and foreign relief is generally seen as some sort of irrelevance. None of these nations has done very much for Haiti and even when other Muslim countries suffer, they are painfully slow and sometimes apparently indifferent. Because we’re supposed to believe that all values are the same, however, this fact tends to slip under the ideological carpet.
In the West, there is genuine goodness but there are also some glaring inconsistencies. There is something nauseating, for example, about obscenely wealthy celebrities who are paid $20 million for a few months’ work on a movie telling working people to donate chunks of their income to the latest cause. What the likes of George Clooney and Angelina Jolie fail to realize is that they personify unfairness and inequality in the world.
The same system that pays an actor for a minute’s labour what it pays a nurse for a year’s effort also allows North Americans to spend more on diets than Africans do on food. The nurse isn’t to blame, but leftist actors telling others what to do certainly are. Equally repugnant is what that great moral philosopher Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols referred to as “holidays in other people’s misery.”
Vacations in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Mexico and the rest are only available and affordable because of the poverty in which the staff in the hotels and resorts are forced to live. The response tends to be that without tourism these people would be even worse off. Actually tourism is a substitute for investment and industry and allows us to exploit.
Haiti is a massive problem, and of course it’s glorious that we are helping. But some of the tears we’ve seen on television don’t quite convince. We may care very much, but normal people cry for those they know and love personally. This isn’t callousness but human nature. So weeping on demand and false emotion is using Haiti’s pain rather than trying to lessen it.
Most vile of all, though, must be Venezuela’s increasingly fascistic and insane leader Hugo Chavez. He blamed the earthquake on the United States and claimed that the CIA is working on an earthquake machine.
Oddly enough this evil nonsense did not receive the same coverage and condemnation as Pat Robertson’s fatuous statement about God’s punishment. Hugo obviously needs a better publicist — perhaps he should ask one of his millionaire American movie star friends (see above) for some advice.
Read Michael Coren’s new blog at
canoe.ca/corenscomment
