LIVE AID FEEDS THE WORLD . . . AND THE EGO

He spoke about Africa in an unusual way. He spoke of Africa as though Africa was a sick child and he was the parent . ... He had all this money to spend on Africa, and he desperately wanted to do the right thing . . . . But he also had the simplest big-power ideas about the regeneration of Africa.

--V. S. Naipaul, “A Bend in the River”

“Get an ammonia inhalant and see what he does.”

One of the first-aid volunteers stuck an inhalant beneath the nose of the unconscious Live Aid fan. He moaned low, virtually in sync with the 92,000 voices outside, roaring collective approval of the coupling of Black Sabbath and Ozzy Osbourne on stage.

“Oh, God,” began the unconscious fan after the first whiff.

“Yahhhhhh!” came the response from down in the field at Philadelphia’s mammoth JFK Stadium. Thousands of arms shot up in rhythm to a Dracula-caped Ozzy.

The semi-conscious fan leaned off his stretcher and got sick in the dust. He held the throb in his head with both listless hands, moaning low. Sick or sober, he was at JFK for a good cause and the volunteers treated him accordingly.

“It’s something I can do to help,” said one young woman who was paid nothing for a day of pampering people who would normally be arrested on drunk-and-disorderly charges on the streets outside of the stadium. “In a way, it helps Africa.”

With that one exception--helping Africa--the rock event of the decade could have been Woodstock or Altamont. In many ways, it turned out to be a pop music Billy Graham Crusade, converting thousands of rock fans into True Believers. Live Aid seemed a culmination of some wonderful and different campaign in the decades-old struggle to feed starving Africa, according to the morning headlines and evening anchormen.

And people believed in it deeply enough to contribute an estimated $40 million in a single day.

Live Aid is the most recent climax in an outpouring of Western generosity and fierce hope that began nine months ago with the release of “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” And, six months after the release of “We Are the World,” the movement shows no signs of letting up.

But what of this mania to feed Africa? Is it a national compassion for a dying continent or just a musical fad? And why now?

Some cultural observers say it’s simple Western guilt, brought on by having too much while other parts of the Earth have less than nothing.

Others subscribe to the extended family theory: an upbeat cause combined with the inherent thrill of rock ‘n’ roll creates a bond of commonality. Ending hunger through Band Aid, USA for Africa and Live Aid has become as enduring a current in the 1980s as ending war through the Doors, Dylan and Woodstock was during the ‘60s.

“It’s a positive idea and it’s a simple idea: end hunger by the end of the century. It’s like when we put a man on the moon. It’s so exciting and it’s something we can all participate in,” said Pam Brunell, director of marketing for “Megatrends” author John Naisbett’s think tank, the Naisbett Group.

She traces the Live Aid genesis back five years to the creation of the Hunger Project and other grass-roots programs to stop world hunger.

But Brunell said that unlike the No Nukes movement or the more recent anti-apartheid demonstrations against South Africa, ending hunger is a tangible, supposedly attainable goal in which everyone can participate without having to take political sides.

How the problem was stated, in a simple, concrete rock ‘n’ roll proposition equating feeding the world with saving our own lives, completed the positive-and-simple formula, according to Brunell.

“John Kennedy did the same thing when he said we were going to put a man on the moon. He could have said, ‘We’re going to start a space program,’ and nobody would have listened.

“A corporation can say, ‘We’re going to have a 10% profit this year’ or it can say, ‘We are going to create a more nurturing, caring environment for our employees this year.’ Which do you think will get better results?”

One of Naisbett’s megatrend propositions is that the United States has become a “bottom-up society,” with ideas beginning in the hinterlands rather than the great scenes of power, like Washington or New York City. Rock famine-fighting is proof of that corollary, Brunell said.

“There is a whole group out there who are not the yuppies that Newsweek says they are,” Brunell said. “Materialism represents all the things we rebelled against in the ‘60s when we went to the 10-cent store and bought cheap jeans.

“All of us want money to a certain extent, but not all of us want to buy BMWs. I know a woman who is a stockbroker in New York, but her goal is not to buy a BMW. She’d like a nice house, but she’d like to do something more too.”

Naisbett himself has a darker vision of Live Aid’s implications.

“It’s the opposite side of terrorism,” he said.

He noted that the worldwide satellite rock video linkup to benefit Africa followed another similar global video linkup by only three weeks. Both Live Aid and the TWA jetliner hijacking mesmerized Americans in their living rooms, and Naisbett does not see the two events as somehow mutually exclusive.

“They are two sides of the same coin,” he said, adding that the common link from a media standpoint is technology and impact.

“It’s a little bit like advertising. We are so bombarded by so much information from so many sources that, in order to get people’s attention, you must do something spectacular. Live Aid was just such an extraordinary event,” he said.

Unfortunately, so was the TWA hijacking.

The late Canadian media philosopher Marshall McLuhan’s vision of a global village, brought together by satellite TV, has in fact come to pass.

“He called it. That’s for sure,” Naisbett said.

Live Aid demonstrated that universal music and the upbeat message it carries can now be a creative, powerful diplomatic tool, bringing all peoples together on a positive note, Naisbett concluded.

But, he added, it also can be a tool for holding the world hostage.

“The working supposition at the moment is that the Me Generation, the so-called yuppies, have achieved what they wanted. They have everything,” said USA for Africa Executive Director Marty Rogol.

Since the mid-’70s, when he broke away from Ralph Nader’s public interest law project and began working on hunger projects with the late Harry Chapin and, later, Kenny Rogers, Rogol said he has tried repeatedly to whip up public enthusiasm for the plight of Africa. Now that it seems to have happened spontaneously, he is as perplexed about why as any social scientist.

“There is a point when all of that--the career success, the money, the cars--is simply not enough,” he said.

The day after the concert, Bob Geldof told National Public Radio in an interview that he got into rock ‘n’ roll for megabucks, groupies and fame. He said his charity began after he had sated himself on all three and still found himself disturbingly empty.

Geldof’s view may not be stated eloquently, but his sentiments have been reflected by almost everyone involved in the musical African crusade. Self-indulgence has given way to a movement founded on the yin and yang of yuppie guilt and rocking good feeling.

“I think the first question, though, is: ‘Is there really a change or is it just that the commentators are saying something different now?’ ” Rogol said. “As the universal language, is music simply saying what people have felt all along?

“The issue at the moment is how governments respond to the message. Right now, the public is saying, ‘Africa is an issue we want addressed.’

“I always kid people in politics that one of the most important things for them to read is People magazine because that’s where a lot of people are at. If a significant part of the population watches ‘Dynasty’ and ‘Dallas,’ instead of putting them down for it, you try to find out why.”

And while high-brow politicians soberly weighed the fate of the world as they do every week, a member of the Norwegian Parliament was promoting Geldof for the Nobel Peace Prize.

A public relations man offered a cynical view: “If Bob Geldof can win the Nobel Peace Prize, then you or anybody else can win the Publisher’s Clearing House Sweepstakes. It’s not only more money, you also get a chance to meet Ed McMahon.”

The same entertainment industry has those who doubt the depth and sincerity of this crusade. The veteran PR executive above, whose firm handles one of the acts at Live Aid, brutally scoffed at the West’s sudden rock ‘n’ roll awakening to the plightof Africa.

He acknowledges that criticizing the feeding of dying children half a world away is suicidal sacrilege, so he spoke to Calendar on condition his name be withheld for obvious fear of reprisal from his peers and even his own clients.

“What it all means is making sure that the other guy picks up the lunch check. That’s what it all means. It’s a scam that Geldof has been trying to pull off for years. It’s like surfing: He caught the big one, hung 10 and rode it out. He’s still riding it too.

“But it’s not going to last. Know why? Your basic cynic gets caught up in it all, actually feels good about it for a while and then finds out it’s hard work and he isn’t making any money. Only Americans have to do this. This is good old-fashioned Jewish-Catholic-Italian-Polish-Anglo-Saxon guilt. It cost my clients $12,000 to do this concert. They had to rent a Learjet to get there in time. But they were absolutely thrilled to do it.

“My question is this: Why Africa? When I was a kid, I had polio. Why not give to the March of Dimes? They accomplished something. Why not cancer research? When you throw that much money into another continent where they just don’t think like we do, it winds up being political and the guys in power resent it. No wonder the Third World hates us. They’ve been starving for years and years and all of a sudden the Europeans and the West start throwing money at them and telling them how to spend it to save their babies.

“The best line in the concert came from Dylan. With all this Sally Field breast-beating the press has been doing since, it was been completely passed over. He asked why we don’t do something in this country for our own farmers. There’s been three major motion pictures in the past year about people losing their damn farms and you think anybody gives a . . . ?

“But save one of these primitive bozos who have looked at hunger for centuries as if it were as natural as mercy killing or unhooking the machine is in the U.S. and everyone goes nuts. Why can’t we take care of our own?”

“Oh my God,” the fan moaned.

“Somebody come help clean this up?” yelled a volunteer clad in a red-and-white first-aid T-shirt. He got no immediate response from the handful of first-aid volunteers, clustered at an opening in the stands where Ozzy could be seen gyrating on stage. So, he began swabbing at the fan himself.

The fan, clad only in faded blue jeans, lay on a stretcher in the tomblike atmosphere of cold concrete and urinal musk beneath the stadium stands. The stretcher was being hefted by a pair of volunteers off the back of a flat-bed golf cart that made the Live Aid rounds, picking up the worst cases . . . 165 of them by noon.

A quick diagnosis came from the infirmary:

Drunk.

Unlike Africa, this one would be all right in the morning, said one of the 20 doctors assigned to minister to the Live Aid sick and intemperate.

The driver of the first-aid golf cart revved up and scooted off out into the crowd again, looking for more of the overindulgent and singing happily to himself over the whine of his engine:

“I know, it’s only rock ‘n’ roll, but I like it, love it, yes I do.”