Catching up on my RSS feeds after a week of ignoring them, I hit two videos that made my skin crawl a bit. The first is a music video from a group called The Green Children, shot in Bangladesh. The song is "Hear Me Now." It was written "to celebrate the amazing women who are microcredit clients of Grameen Bank." Half the iTunes proceeds will support microcredit in Kerala, India. One shot that bothers me comes near the end and is of a brick breaker. Brick breakers in Bangladesh do exactly what it sounds like they do, smashing masonry into aggregate for concrete all day; they are the poorest of the poor in a very poor land. They are not symbols of microenterprise success even when they smile for the camera.If you've been reading this blog for a while, you can probably see that critical detachment comes more easily to me than indignation, though I am capable of anger at those who build platforms of certainty on pillars of intellectual sand. If you want confident outrage about pop stars saving the poor, visit Aid Watch or Wronging Rights. As for me, I am genuinely unsure what to think. Should I listen to my gut reaction to this as saccharine mythologizing that lets rich people feel good about themselves by exaggerating how easy it is to combat poverty? Or am I being intellectually snobbish about the direct appeal to emotions? I'd appreciate your thoughts as there is a larger theme here about how microfinance is promoted.The other video causes me no such confusion. It is an interview with Muhammad Yunus on CNBC and I hasten to emphasize that my problem is not with Yunus's words. On the contrary, the way the clip is produced---the incessant whiz-bang special effects---and the tone and quality of the questions are downright disrespectful of the Professor. They pin the Dow Jones Industrial Average on the man's chest. Perhaps because I so rarely watch television news, I was taken aback by the production. It embarrasses me as an American.
This passage from Jerry Mander's Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television has long stuck with me and came to mind as I watched:
Again, I'm only accusing the Americans of vacuousness. After Mander published his book in 1977, MTV arrived and continued the long-term trend toward more special effects per second---and defined the video idiom in which the Green Children clip was made. So I suppose these two videos are distant kin. Both incongruously embed pretty women in kaleidoscopic scenes of poverty in Bangladesh.Compare them to this thoughtful and longer BBC radio story on the impacts of microcredit.
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