I admit to slacking on the job lately when it comes to celebrity-watching (though it’s great sport). It did filter through the din that Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie had their baby last weekend, in Africa. I didn’t realize, however, that they occupied Namibia:
Over the past six weeks a Western security force has effectively taken over the small African nation of Namibia. A beach resort in Langstrand in Western Namibia has been sealed off with security cordons, and armed security personnel have been keeping both local residents and visiting foreigners at bay. A no-fly zone has been enforced over part of the country. The Westerners have also demanded that the Namibian government severely restrict the movement of journalists into and out of Namibia. The government agreed and, in a move described by one human rights organisation as ‘heavy-handed and brutal’, banned certain reporters from crossing its borders.
However, this Western security force is not a US or European army plundering Namibia’s natural resources or threatening to topple its government. It is the security entourage of one Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, the celebrity couple better known for living it up in LA than slumming it in Namibia. They reportedly wanted their first child to be born in Namibia because the country is ‘the cradle of human kind’ and it would be a ‘special’ experience (1). And it seems that no security measure is too stringent in the name of making Ms Jolie feel special. Welcome to the new celebrity colonialism.
The author of this piece, Brendan O’Neill, is a little harsh on celebrities who go to Africa or some other poor place to make themselves feel “special” and do some gratuitous moral posturing in the process. And he paints my boy Bono with the same broad brush as Brangelina.
Come now! I can’t get too upset about this. It’s just too funny. This is the same couple that spread themselves over 60 pages of W magazine last summer, posing as a 1960s married couple, when they weren’t yet officially out as a romantic couple in real life—in other words, they went totally tabloid on themselves—
and now they shut down an African country to get some privacy for the birth of their baby.
It’s too delicious!
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[...] I like Anderson Cooper. I’ve been watching his show since way before he became an icon. He’s sharp, intellectually curious, and self-deprecating. He also has a sense of humor, and a sense of proportion. Cooper left a bigger mark of his personality and interests on his show before Jonathan Klein decided to make him the future of CNN, but I still like him. He’s beginning to sound like a Company Man, though. I made fun of “Brangelina’s colonialism” here, and I agree with the Flack about the inteview with Our Lady of Namibia: Separately, Mr. Cooper staunchly defended CNN’s journalistic integrity by denying the rumors that the cable network compensated Ms. Jolie for the interview. He cited his Time-Warner sister, People magazine, and its cash payoff to land those baby pics. “What I do know is that CNN did not pay anything — directly or indirectly — to get Angelina Jolie to sit down for an interview.” Perhaps not…at least on the surface, but the Jolie camp-prompted interview did come with a price tag: an agreement by the network to use the two-hour block of time to showcase Ms. Jolie’s humanitarian work in less developed countries. [...]
[...] Our Lady of Namibia is morally superior to Madonna. Angelina Jolie has attacked Madonna for adopting a child ‘illegally’. [...]
[...] [[See Joshua Gamson’s book Claims to Fame and this post about Angelina Jolie, and this one, if you want to understand where I’m coming from with my celebrity obsession. It’s the scholarly approach, ha ha. And see how Gawker calls out Glenn Greenwald for getting on his high horse about The Politico. And see why gossip is good for us. Also: read Scorpion Tongues, by Gail Collins, former editorial-page editor of the New York Times, on how gossip has always been a weapon of the powerless against the privileged. And watch this space to see if I get it together to write up a more graceful version of my neat little theory about why infotainment rules.]] [...]
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