When you ride ALONE you ride with bin Laden #3
What the government should be telling us to help fight the war on terrorism.
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by Bill Maher

The third installment of a sampling of essays from the marvelous book of the same name, written by the funniest social and political satirist since Mark Twain.

Installment index

Dark By Choice

N HIS BABY-ON-THE-TRACKS METAPHOR, ethicist Peter Singer maintains that, if given the choice between saving a third world baby or their new Mercedes, people in wealthy nations would save the Mercedes. Oh, we say we'd save the baby, but we remain willfully ignorant of the connections that make such disparate pleasures as diamonds and farm subsidies bad news for dirt-poor Africans, Asians and Latin Americans.

Americans are very touchy about being called cheap and uncharitable. That we are the most generous of givers is a myth you disabuse at your peril, so let me dive right in: Americans will give, but not very far from home, and it better have a good story or personal touch: Parkinson's research if Michael J. Fox gets it, Jerry's Kids after a three-day weekend of badgering, illegal immigrants if they're cute, age seven and their mom died on the trip over.

We don't feel for anything we have to reach too far to feel for -- foreigners, animals, pot smokers -- those causes are nowhere, have no power. I've heard many people say with a straight face, "Look how we helped Afghanistan."

Well, yeah, after we had a few buildings knocked down over here. Before that, I don't remember a lot of protests and bumper stickers calling for the end of the Taliban thugocracy.

We give 0.01% in non-military foreign aid per year of our budget -- dead last among the rich industrial nations, and less than Elton John's monthly Visa bill. The average voter, thinking foreign aid accounts for 15% of our budget, wants to cut it down to 5%, which would be many times what it is in reality. How can a supposedly smart country operate so often in shadows of ignorance this thick and this dark?

My friend Michael Moore once asked, "Will we ever get to the point where we realize that we'll never be safe as long as the rest of the world is living in poverty so that we can have nice running shoes?"

And not just sneakers. When Professor Singer says we'd really save the car, what he's talking about is things like the Farm Security and Rural Investment Act of 2002, which provides $181 billion in free welfare to prop up grain and cotton prices and buy the love of rich, campaign-contributing American agribusiness (which pretends to be the Joads, but really is Archer-Daniels-Midland). This, of course, creates a glut on the market, artificially driving down prices and crippling African farmers' chances of exporting their way out of poverty. The cotton breathes, the Africans not so much. And the food? Let's just say lots of food rots here, on purpose, to keep up prices, while other people starve.

American politics causes a lot of deaths overseas. Whether it's continuing to cripple the Cuban economy in order to buy votes in Florida (does anyone outside of Little Havana give a rat's ass if we trade with Cuba?), or supporting politically generous pharmaceutical companies in their quest to keep prices up and out of reach of all but a few African AIDS patients, politics and money trump foreign life.

So are we really that evil? Actually, no. I don't feel as guilty as some whites about the colonial past -- mostly because, not being a racist, I believe humans of all races have the same amount of good (some) and evil (a lot) in them. If the Africans had been more technologically advanced, they would have done it to us -- look at Rick James. They certainly did it to their own people, because it wasn't whites who were capturing the slaves in the African interior and bringing them to port.

But that was then, before enlightenment, compassion and kinder-gentler came along. Also, mostly, before awareness. Even a century ago, places like Africa were out of sight, out of mind. They really did call it "the Dark Continent."

But today we live in a global village. It's a continent dark by choice now. We can see what's going on all over the globe, and instantly. And the people in those villages, and big cities, know we can see, and they know we could do more if we cared to.

What they are saying about Americans is: "It would cost them so little of their comfort to alleviate a great deal of the abject misery in the world... but even a little bit is too much for them." We're the rich guy flipping a quarter to the starving multitudes, claiming to be "Christian," and saying, "Hey, it's not my fault you're starving."

Which is mostly true, it's not our fault. But that doesn't mean we're still not pricks for giving only a quarter.

The restaurant in the World Trade Center was called Windows on the World. We should take the hint.

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