Sunday, December 26, 2010

Condescension for Christmas

For the record, I have had a lovely Christmas filled with fun, laughter, great company, presents and good food.  Despite all this goodness though there is one fly in the ointment of my joy.  See I get that Christmas music is generally terrible so I don't hold it to a very high standard.  There is one song though that manages to grate my gears despite my best efforts - Feed the world by Band Aid.



Honestly, should that even count as a Christmas song?  It's not even really about Christmas, it's just a reminder of how you have everything in life while the sad sad people in Africa suffer.  All it does is attempt to make you feel like crap for not having a hellish life.  Worst part of all that is that they do it in an unbelievably condescending and utterly ignorant way.  So as a (extremely belated) Christmas present to these entitled bleeding heart rich kids, this African is going to lay down some factoids.

First of all, what is the deal with all this whining about there not being snow in Africa on Christmas?  WTF guys? You do realise that its Summer in the southern half of Africa during Christmastime, right?  (The northern hemisphere does have winter but it's all desert so again, no snow)  It's always been that way too so you won't find any kids in Africa weeping because the snow harvest didn't come.  Are you guys retarded or something?  

To answer the big question - do we know it's Christmas time at all? - well yes, yes we do.  You condescending asshats may not realise this but people in Africa have had access to the magic of "calendars" for many many years now!  Also, seeing as how the continent has around 400 million Christians, I can pretty much promise you we are all very aware of this whole "Christmas" thing.  We've been celebrating it on the continent for hundreds of years without the need for sanctimonious Europeans graciously reminding us that the day exists.

Lastly, yes I do get that this song was written for aid to the suffering Ethiopians in the. 80's but I really get royally pissed when people talk of Africa as if it's a single country.  This song never once mentions Ethiopia, instead using the blanket term "Africa" as if they are interchangeable things  Look, I get it, the British educational system is clearly crap and failed everyone in the United Kingdom - or at least their pop stars.  That is the only possible explanation I can think of for statements like "Where nothing ever grows;  No rain or rivers flow".  How is a statement this ignorant even possible from people living in the land of David Attenborough?   We have jungles, forests, endless savannas, entire plant kingdoms unique to the continent and no shortage of arable land.  Trust me Bono, plenty of things grow in Africa.  Also, while we do suffer terrible droughts we do get rains in Africa.  Toto even wrote a song about it ffs!  As for rivers, (1) we have many rivers and a great many of them do flow and (2) seriously, you don't even know about the Nile?  C'mon guys you people had colonies all over the place!  Seriously?!

  

4 comments:

GumbyTheCat said...

Hmmm. Where's my bottle of snark pills? Can't find 'em anywhere... where could they have gone?

Eugene said...

Try: http://www.amazon.com/Snark-Handbook-Reference-Verbal-Sparring/dp/1602397600/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&qid=1293589613&sr=8-6

TimmyMac said...

LMAO . . . Beautiful!

Ali said...

YES!

I'm a South African in the UK and I heard this song for the first time yesterday, and it made my jaw drop. But I couldn't make my European and American friends understand what was wrong with it! You put it into words much better than I did. I just kept spluttering "Infantilising! Patronsing! Colonial mentality! Eurocentric!", which didn't really help me get my point across.