As I watch the news, read the newspapers and what have you, all I see is "sexy"... not catwalk sexy or shake your laffy taffy sexy (depending on how your pendulum swings)... but "This will make a killer headline" 'sexy'. So we are inundated by news of so and so's disastrous breakup, like people don't get dumped everyday... we "oooh" and "aaah" as the details of Dominique Strauss-Kahn's alleged fetish for violent sex is narrated as if thousands of women are not raped each day... 1500 a month in the DRC alone, multiple times... but let's face it, the plight of the poor women in the eastern DRC stopped being glamorous round about the same time it became a cliche to refer to Goma as "the rape capital of the world"...
A friend earlier remarked that the media is acting as if famine is a new thing in Somalia... why do people "care" all of a sudden? I'll tell you why... after months of hearing and seeing the violence in Libya, "the world" is ready for something new, something en vogue... *drum roll please* In saunter the hungry people of east Africa onto our TV screens... Oh yes! Now, we've got "news".. I saw a clip on the news yesterday where the poor Somali child looked like she was made to look sad... Nothing quite like images of emaciated starving eastern Africans to get those TV ratings up... as I supped on my TV dinner, I wondered what I could possibly do to make that poor woman and her children better? Send a goat perhaps? Plant a tree? We ARE going green after all.. and if I plant this one tree in this one corner of the world... that little family on my screen might just disappear... into oblivion... or perhaps they'll just stay exactly where they are, suffering the same pain as the camera pans to the streets of Mzuzu... I hear the Malawians have had it! They want their neo-dictator to go... They can't take it anymore! Run along now dear sexy seekers, you need that "money shot"! The one that'll beat all the others and make it on the cover of National Geographic.. maybe even feature on Al Jazeera... I do love me some news...
