Commentary : POP DISCOVERS THE POWER OF GIVING

For the Woodstock generation who abandoned life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for the more worldly pursuits of money, power and property, 1985 had to be a year of some spiritualthanksgiving . . . even if contributions to the Live Aid Foundation or USA for Africa are tax deductible.

In a curious way, the passion to save Africa through pop music and media saturation also may have influenced national politics for years to come. From World Vision telethons to Willie Nelson’s crusade to save the family farm, the mix of media and compassion seems finally to have rung the curtain down on the self-indulgent Me Decade.

This Thanksgiving, America celebrates the first year of a We Decade.

Thanks goes to an odd recipe consisting of Hollywood hype, satellite telecommunications technology and a cold, televised eye focused on the wholesale starvation of thousands of African children.

Thanks also goes to rock musicians who unwittingly mobilized yuppies, WASPs, neo-conservatives and latent liberals in the widest range of popular common causes since the last soldier switched the light out at the end of the Vietnam tunnel 10 years ago.

And, above all, thanks goes to each American who bucked the fend-for-yourself fashion long enough to invest in compassion, even if it came in the form of a 33 r.p.m. record album.

If nothing else, USA for Africa’s “Year of Giving” appears to have heightened the impact of mass media and its emphasis on theater. The melding of media and politics in this off-election year seems clearly to have given the entertainment industry the edge in setting the nation’s 1986 political agenda, according to several theorists.

Two years ago, “Megatrends” author John Naisbett predicted a proportionate rise in media/entertainment power as interest in national politics waned. “Future Shock” author Alvin Toffler foresaw the same phenomenon even earlier in “The Third Wave.” Even 20 years ago, the late Canadian media guru Marshall McLuhan was able to detail the exploitative impact television and radio events could have on social causes.

Live Aid Foundation President Mike Mitchell, who was responsible for the international simulcast of last July’s Live Aid concerts, said in an interview last summer that he is now in a position to put the principals of McLuhan’s “Understanding Media” into effect.

His post-Live Aid plans have been dedicated to bringing about McLuhan’s “global village” concept by using satellite technology to exploit a kind of international entertainment-oriented diplomacy. Mitchell’s Worldwide Sports and Entertainment Inc., has more than a dozen multinational media events in the planning stages.

International fashion follies and borderless musical variety shows will become the norm, he believes, linking the world into one big living room with a multimillion-member nuclear family gathered around the TV set.

USA for Africa’s Ken Kragen has already implemented his next mega-event: a plan to save America’s poverty-stricken by asking six million Americans to pay at least $10 apiece to link hands next May 25. The $100 million he hopes to raise will go to organizations dedicated to feeding, sheltering, clothing and educating America’s 20 million poor.

As of last week, “Hands Across America” had only attracted about $600,000 in pledges and about 31,000 participants--enough to stretch across 20 of the 4,000 miles the human chain will have to cover from New York to Los Angeles.

Kragen told The Times that a succession of full-page ads in magazines and newspapers is scheduled to begin next month and the real drive to “fill the line,” as he puts it, will begin in earnest after the first of the year.

To predict success or failure of any of these next mega-events in the remarkable succession of “Aids” spawned in 1985 is probably as premature as a tea-leaf reading of the outcome of the 1988 presidential election.

In one sense, today’s “Comic Relief” (see related story on Page 1) looks like one more “Aid” gimmick in a year brimming with feed-the-world flashdance. When in doubt, when all hope is gone, when nobody is listening, the Hollywood prescription reads:

“Hey kids! I’ve got it! Let’s put on a show!”

But the simplistic Andy Hardy message that USA for Africa President Ken Kragen and Live Aid/Band Aid impresario Bob Geldof have preached throughout 1985 is working once again, even if it’s only in today’s funny papers.

“It’s not compassion fatigue we’re dealing with,” said USA for Africa Executive Director Marty Rogol of the recent doldrums that seem to have affected post-Farm Aid charity efforts. “It’s event fatigue. It’s up to us to keep the public interested in the message.”

Which raises the question of just how simplistic the compassion message really is . . . and how deeply it touches the grass roots of American pity, passion and politics.

The creative gimmickry this time around may be “Comic Relief,” but the mass appeal strikes a deeper chord. The various entertainment industry efforts of the past year have raised more than $100 million for charity, but nobody has been able to put a value on the media attention focused on the hungry, homeless and oppressed.

“It’s almost like a return to the ‘60s,” said ABC Radio newsman Mark Scheerer who covered most of the rock charity events of 1985.

It’s also as if the hardwood party platform the Republicans built in Dallas last year has mellowed to balsa, while the splinters of the Democrats’ platform that collapsed on Election Day 12 months ago have been rebuilt this year, plank by plank, Aid by Aid.

From Ethiopia to the family farm, from apartheid to acquired immune deficiency syndrome, the bipartisan message that pop musicians have extolled has been one of urgency. Save people now and worry about the political implications later--if at all.

Rock stars were joined in this existential expediency by the strangest grass-roots coalition since Leonard Bernstein had the Black Panthers over for dinner.

Cartoonists, Coca-Cola, actors, General Motors, fashion models, McDonald’s and other assorted activists all staged or underwrote their own fund-raisers, dodging the inevitable charges of playing politics by denying credit to either the Democrats or the Republicans. Whether it’s Willie Nelson, Harry Belafonte, Geldof or Kragen, each individual Aid leader has concentrated on his or her cause rather than any potential political implications.

Regardless of their attempts to skirt politics, the Aid organizers increasingly find themselves facing political questions in this Year of Giving--as 1985 has been dubbed by USA for Africa.

It has also been the year of the Geneva Summit Meeting, when U.S. domestic politics have taken a back seat to such international concerns as “Star Wars” nuclear gymnastics, South African apartheid policies, sporadic pulses of media-massaged terrorism and--of course--African famine.

America has a likable septuagenarian in the White House and the consumer credit economy by which most people live is comfortable, even though the federal government is mortgaged to the hilt. There might be a contradiction built into a nation that carries a $200-billion deficit while many of its citizens are more concerned with the outcome of this week’s “Miami Vice” than with who’s running the White House. But it’s safe to assume that most Americans don’t see that contradiction.

The simplest theory explaining the media mix of rock, roll and charity bypasses the topic of politics altogether.

“It’s just yuppie guilt,” said a Sunset Boulevard restaurant publicist who also represents several rock stars. “Don’t worry. It’ll go away.”

Perhaps.

But Live Aid’s Mike Mitchell doesn’t think so.

“None of this has anything to do with Africa. Anyone who has thought of it in that way is thinking wrong. You, me, the world, we all decide for whatever reason to have certain things in our consciousness at certain times. When it’s unconscious, then we’re not really aware of it, even if it’s going on in front of us.

“It’s the way some husbands and wives act. Much of their behavior is unconscious and they only look back later and say, “Oh my God! Look at the way we act!’ And then they think about changing their lives.

“Africa was that kind of test for the civilized world. It was our souls that were at risk, not theirs. It’s a totally selfish act. I mean, they will go on being Africans, doing what they do and they will ultimately save themselves or not.

“But if we don’t reach out, we’ve already sealed our fate. We’ve lost our humanism. We’ve lost caring. We’ve lost what I call our souls.”

In some ways, 1985’s passionate national outpouring of sympathy for the poor, pained and disenfranchised, coupled with mass disinterest in domestic politics, seems a social schizophrenia unmatched since the Eisenhower years.

Then, as now, pop music from folk singers like the Weavers or early rockers like Little Richard belied the dull ennui of Cold War America.

USA for Africa and Live Aid officials say they remain basically apolitical, ironically enough, because they believe that traditional politics is no longer where the power is.

“In 1959, the power in this country rested in the White House,” one African relief agency executive who was swept up in Hollywood’s rush to save Africa, told The Times.

During the decade that followed, it was easy to ring the White House, to placard the Pentagon, to focus on the three-piece suits inside the corridors of power in order to effect social change.

Today, it is irrelevant, said an African relief agency executive, who asked that her name not be used for fear that a political opinion might deny the agency a slice of the $36-million “We Are the World” pie.

“Right now, power is not in the White House,” the executive said. “I don’t know how it got there, but power in this country today is in all these Aid benefits.”

The paradox is even more apparent outside America.

“Reagan is President. He’s your leader. But he doesn’t have control,” said a British charity worker involved in the African relief effort.

The USA for Africa show has run the gamut, from an all-night all-star recording session to records, tapes, videos and television programs to Africa itself. At various points along the way, Kragen’s “We Are the World” road show has taken over the New York City Ballet, hundreds of children’s choirs and every radio station in America.

It has lifted the term “social consciousness” out of the New Right’s dustbin, cleaned it up and made it a fitting part of the Western vernacular again after half a decade of ignominy.

But now that the year of pop-music altruism has saved the family farm, aided Mexican earthquake victims, ostracized South Africa and put the entire continent of Africa on the road to recovery, what happens next?

Geldof and Mitchell saw it as an opportunity to do some good work and to draw some attention to a genuine need before getting on with their careers.

Kragen and Belafonte saw it as a new beginning in an indifferent America--maybe a chance to truly end world hunger before the end of the century. For them, it became a calling.

Was 1985 just a temporary aberration or a Woodstock that will last? Was it a year that will be remembered for that uniquely American kind of compassion for the underdog, or that equally uniquely American kind of lust for success, fame and ego gratification?

As it comes to an end, it seems just too early to tell. TV Nielsen ratings for last week put the hourlong CBS special “We Are the World: A Year of Giving” at No. 54 out of 61 prime-time network programs. Playing opposite NBC’s “The A-Team” and two ABC sitcoms, “Who’s the Boss” and “Growing Pains,” this culminating documentary on the pop charity phenomenon attracted fewer viewers than such perennial cellar dwellers as “Ripley’s Believe It or Not” and “Spenser for Hire.”

Understanding 1985, the Year of Giving, is ultimately as perplexing as an analysis of the emotional foundations of petty greed, or the incalculable limits of the human heart.

Amen.