XDA

I watched the HBO original film The Girl in the Cafe as it premiered last night. They'll play it again in the coming weeks and months. At first, I was enthusiastic. Then I soured and this short post is on why.

I'm a big fan of Love Actually and Bill Nighy is a big part of that film. So he started off with a lot of capital in his good-will bank from me. And he remained great. He tells of the recurring dream he has where he's asked to join the Rolling Stones (he defers) and then his next social triumphs are accompanied by a power chord on the sound track and his jumping to a modified Townsend leap. Otherwise he acts a repressed, anal civil servant with a heart of gold as if he actually knew what it was like. The girl, Kelly Macdonald, who has OK good looks, has the extreme advantage (to me at least) of having a Scottish accent you can actually understand. Few accents are sexier. But she becomes a bit tedious. And I think she does so because she has to keep mouthing the political message of the film, its raison de etra (I thought was going to be a romance, but it was political propaganda instead--not lying or bad propaganda, but propaganda none the less). Here's the message--we must help the desperately poor (mainly in Africa) with aid, debt forgiveness and trade or we are responsible for their deaths (one every three seconds--the movie ends with snaps of the fingers every three seconds, an echo of the statistic).

What liberal, do-gooder bull s--t is this? The first two "solutions" the movie supports are throw money at the problem (because debts that are forgiven are not gone, merely transferred to the taxpayers of the forgiving nation). We in America, having funded a multi-billion War on Poverty that made things a lot worse, know that throwing money at a problem is no solution at all. How does it help one poor person in Malawi, for example, for the leaders of that country to have huge Swiss bank accounts? (I know that's a 'racist', slanderous charge and probably not deserved by the good leaders of Malawi, which country I chose at random, but it is a continuing problem everywhere that much too much of the aid gets skimmed off by local politicians and until that problem is at least lessoned, you're just fooling yourself to say that giving more money to Zimbabwe, for example, will actually help any of the desperate poor there.

Now about trade. If we in some way have trade barriers between us and poor nations, let's take them down. I and most real conservatives are staunch free-traders. No one has explained to me what trade barriers there are between us and Cameroon, for example, but perhaps I'm just not listening. I do recall an effort by our current administration to take away most if not all trade barriers between us and Central America. The legislation is called CAFTA, and it probably won't pass because of the Democrat's opposition. Check out this story from Detroit in early June. So don't be giving me, a Republican, this guilt trip about causing death by opposing free trade; it's neither me nor my party doing that (a little fact completely left out of the film).

The romance part of the story and the ending (which perhaps too subtlely hints at the outcome of the mythical G-8 meeting) get a thumbs up from me but what a mere surface inspection of a problem that goes to the bone of human existence. At the web-site for the movie, they quote Nelson Mandella, who says poverty is a man made problem not people's natural state. How wrong he is. Poverty is the default position, the natural state of man, and hard work in a just society is the only thing that creates wealth. Because not everyone works hard, or if they do, are not always allowed to keep the benefits of their labor, (and because some people who make money are very unwise spenders) the poor you will always have with us, or so I've heard.