Life is like a mop. Sometimes life gets full of dirt and crud and hairballs and things and you gotta clean it out. You gotta stick it in here and rinse it off and start all over again. And sometimes life sticks to the floor so much that a mop, a mop, it's not good enough. You gotta get down there with like a toothbrush, you know, and you gotta really scrub 'cause you gotta get it off. But if that doesn't work, you can't give up. You gotta stand right up. You gotta run to a window and say, "These floors are dirty as hell, and I'm not gonna take it any more."
--Stanley Spadowski, UHF
Scene: A Scottish moneybags executive decides to give $100m to poor Africans, which gives him a chance to make an utterly predictable argument in Monday's Times:
Sir Tom takes pains to distinguish his projects from traditional aid projects. He calls the strategies of international aid agencies "a busted flush," accusing them of caring more about their own survival than about the poor.It's predictable because Sir Tom is one of two archetypes in the aid debate: the bloated mainstream do-gooding organization and the bold, results-oriented, organization that is run by a messianic rich guy.
Sir Tom, for instance, observes that saving the poor is about getting "what marks you out:"
"I think that when I sold the business, I got the equivalent of $500 million when I was 37, and I had started 14 years earlier with nothing. At 37, I started to think, what is it all about? Something I would take my whole life to do I had achieved quite early. I came to the view that money was only half the argument. What you do with the money is what marks you out," he said.And like other wealthy philanthropic soloists, Sir Tom wants to focus on the poorest of the poor.
That's morally laudable, but often not the best bit of strategy. You can sometimes nudge a country forward much better by supporting people who already have skills and employment (who know what do with money alreayd). And it's always more effective to give a country aid before the drought/war comes and the children with the bellies and the flies are on the Beeb.
Enter Paul Theroux, world renowned author of stroke books and more high-minded stuff. The author gets in a few good shots ("There are probably more annoying things than being hectored about African development by a wealthy Irish rock star in a cowboy hat, but I can't think of one at the moment.") in Friday's NYT editorial page (not online).
But he blows it pretty quick. After taking Bill Gates to task for the "unproductive not to say insane idea" of getting cheap computer to Africans, P.T. Yankem offers his own solution:
I would offer pencils and paper, mops and brooms: the schools I have seen in Malawi need them badly. I would not send more teachers. I would expect Malawians themselves to stay and teach. There ought to be an insistence in the form of a bond, or a solemn promise, for Africans trained in medicine and education at the state's expense to work in their own countries.So Paul recommends solemn promises and mops. The first would work on Conan the Barbarian, various protagonists from Sin City, and most certainly on Bruce Wayne. But in the real world, people usually follow the path toward the profit. Take, for instance, everyone that came to America.
As for the mops: Paul has put out two good selling books in three years. I bet he could afford to buy some mops. And he's got to have some of that Mosquito Coast money left. That could probably buy some paper. So why the conditional use of "I would"? You can, Mr. Theroux. Please get to it, for the sake of all.
