Can There Be a Decent Jeffrey Sachs Profile?

The man with the hair helmet is Jeffrey Sachs, and his organization gets money when you buy the shirt Bono tells you to buy. And then Sachs helps the kids.

But a series of unreadable articles points out the same recurring problem: What happens when Sachs isn't around?

• The April issue of Harper's explained (in a horribly boring way) how local politicians and elites in Kenya ignored Sachs' advice as soon as he was out of sight.
• Bono's Vanity Fair issue explains how Uganda's president couldn't be bothered to act like he was listening to Sachs' in-person advice.
• Today's Times looks at how Sachs' attempt guide oil development the tiny island country of Sao Tome and Principe got bulldozed by the corrupt oil interests in neighboring Nigeria. No one with real power would do what Sachs said.
  

In each (dry as toast) report, some optimistic doctors, technocrats, and reform-minded politicians are very happy with Sachs. But the peasants and presidents just wait for the ruddy-faced man to leave, already.

"Do you think anyone in Rwanda's got a ----ing lactose intolerance?"

Chris Rock was rebranding Africa when U2 was in its Village People stage. But Bono published his African diary from a few years ago (not online). And it's exactly what the issue should have been:

DAY ONE:
The flight kicked my ass. My wife, my two kids and I flew 20 hours from New York, which gives you an idea how long it took the slaves ships to get to America. The flight felt like the Middle Passage to me. When we landed I had lost my religion, my culture, my name. Africa is almost as far away as the Moon. They should have the space shuttle take you to Africa. I walked back to coach where my nanny was, and she was dead.
...
DAY TWO:
Left the comfort of Johannesburg and drove into Soweto. There's nothing like the poverty I saw in Soweto. Imagine the worst ghetto in America. Now set it on fire. Now try to put the fire out with shit--and it's still not as bad as how people live in parts of Soweto.
...
DAY FIVE:
Got on another plane. Went to the great Nelson Mandela's house. I felt a lot of pressure. It was around the time that Richard Pryor died, so I asked him, Did he get to see any Richard Pryor while he was in jail? He paused, looked me in the eye, and said. "Who's Richard Pryor?" I guess Mandela was in real prison.

Tell me that cover wouldn't have sold better. They try to tie Rock down in an interview online, but he insists on talking about Emily Dickinson. He's apparently not going to preach unless there's a decent punchline involved.

Brad Pitt Is Interview Death

Also from Bono's Vanity Fair issue, but not online: Brad Pitt's interview of Desmond Tutu, uncreatively headlined "The Tutu Connection."

BP: What is this concept of ubuntu I keep reading about?
DT: Ubuntu is the essence of being human ... We say a person is a person through other persons. You can't be human in isolation. You are human only in relationships.

Think about that. It's such a great and profound point that, even after Pitt follows it by saying, "So that speaks to our interconnectedness," you still kinda focus more on archbishop's insight than the actor's douchebaggery.

But Pitt can only stay out of the way so long. Soon enough he gives Tutu a slow, fat pitch about "a big argument going on in America right now, on gay rights and equality."

Tutu dutifully crushes the pitch: He could never judge someone for being gay.

This is just pointlessly misleading: When it comes to gay rights, Tutu's South African parish is pretty much the lone outlier. If Tutu wanted to take his fellow Africans to task for their homophobia, that would be one thing to bring it up in the interview. But he doesn't.

If you were trying to explain New York to people, would you profile the one guy who had good feelings toward the MTA? The interview just serves to show off how much Tutu agrees with Pitt.

Smarter move: Paying Binyavanga Wainaina to Write

Because I care, I'm going to break down this Africa-centric issue of Vanity Fair that Bono edited...

Binyavanga Wainaina has been the nuts since forever, but especially since his caustic "How to Write About Africa" piece in Granta a year or two ago. His Vanity Fair piece is luminous, original, and not online.

(But "Madonna's Malawi" is. They took the bloggable story and made it unavailable, but they took the story about Michigan's Favorite Floorhumper, which will only be linked to by people who want to mock a celebrity, and gave it an url. Team Bono gets an eff minus minus on these decisions.)

Wainaina writes the history of Kenya's last decade as a history of individual equity: Once the nation's underclass had faith that the government would act as something other than a vampire state, citizens began working with banks, paying taxes, and putting entrepreneurial ingenuity into motion.

It's fascinating stuff for a Kenya dork like myself, and also for your garden variety Tom Friedman/Michael Lewis-worshippers.

But Wainaina closes his piece with jackknife turn:

As I sit here, in upstate New York, and read The New York Times, or watch CNN, Africa feels like one fevered and infectious place. In this diseased world, viruses spread all over--and a small local crisis in one corner can infect the rest of the continent in one quick blink. In a highly suggestive New York Times piece, dated April 23, 2007, and titled "Africa's Crisis of Democracy," Nigeria's recent flawed election is used to show how everything democratic in sub-Saharan Africa is teetering on shaky stilts.

This habit--of trying to turn the second-largest continent in the world, which has 53 countries and nearly a billion people of ever variety and situation, into one giant crisis--is now one of the biggest problems Kenya, South Africa, Tanzania, and Ghana face.

Emphasis mine: Wainaina is saying that the leading countries on the continent (and that's what the countries he named are) should place the opinion of The New York Times on their lists of Big Problems. "Those other 49 countries might be like Nigeria, but we are not," he's saying.

But he won't quite come out and say it. Which is smart enough: many cagey political campaigns have been launched by people who understand that, while it's tough to unite people around positivity, it's easy to unite them around their dislike and distrust of the Times.

This is A+ framing, rebranding.

Rebranding Africa: Making Covers Suck Hard

Because I care, I'm going to break down this Africa-centric issue of Vanity Fair that Bono edited.

Starting with: The issue has twenty different covers and Chris Rock is apparently the only one who can make a Leibovitz photoshoot look interesting.

Whoever inserted that "Got any stock tips?"quote should be curb-yanked. Is a punchline a punchline if it's too stupid to even try to deconstruct?

This issue is supposed to be based around Bono's attempt to "Rebrand Africa" and, with the exception of Rock, its covers are all earnest folks who are very airbrushed and very impressed with themselves. But we already know famous people are impressed by how much they care about Africans.

The only African of note is Desmond Tutu, and they put him next to Brad freaking Pitt, which comes off about as well as sitting me next to my Damn Wifus. She's got the brown eyes and the shapely neck, and I've got the face like a half-shaved ass. Sure, when we get a bite to eat in the open air, I'm a proud husband. But from a visual point of view, it's like plaid on paisley.

Bad visuals, reinforcing the Conventional Wisdom: African covers are newsstand death.