Those clunky translation earpieces were nowhere to be found last Thursday night in the United Nations General Assembly, as a multinational assemblage of talent and star power filled the great hall with music and poetry rather than the usual polyglot diplomacy. The occasion was a concert titled “Breaking the Silence, Beating the Drum,” which sought to remember the victims of past slavery while raising awareness of the contemporary tragedy of human trafficking.
Among the African and African-American luminaries in attendance, from Ladysmith Black Mambazo to the Blind Boys of Alabama to choreographer Bill T. Jones, perhaps the evening’s central performance came from a white guy: musician and activist Peter Buffett, who premiered a new song, “Blood Into Gold,” that he had created in collaboration with the chart-dominating Senegalese rapper/vocalist Akon. The song had been commissioned by the nonprofit Culture Project specifically for the event, and UNICEF produced a video to accompany it.
The issue of human trafficking is having a bit of a moment in the culture right now. The Liam Neeson film Taken, which has taken in more than $137 million at the box office this winter, concerns the kidnapping of young women for sale into sex slavery. (To be more direct, it concerns an ex-CIA operative who massacres the gaggle of nasty Albanians who kidnapped his daughter, but whatever.) Meanwhile, the documentary War Child has been making the rounds of film festivals worldwide, relating the story of a Sudanese child soldier and building on the attention brought to the issue by mainstream films such as 2006’s Blood Diamond.
“It’s interesting how these things happen – how an issue such as trafficking, or Darfur, can suddenly achieve such a public moment,” Buffett says. “Part of it is that, thanks to advances in technology, we’re in this strange time when we can see into the lives of faraway people like never before. So we’re starting to see these darker elements of humanity, and find out what people are capable of.”
The congressional knives are already being sharpened, with Democrats wielding scalpels and Republicans machetes. That’s not to say Democrats are being any more responsible or open-minded about it; it’s just that the special interests they’re protecting are more localized and less demanding. (Democratic Senator Kent Conrad’s refusal to consider reform of farm subsidies is by far the most irresponsible — and cynical, and stereotypical — bit of special-interest bootlicking so far on the record.) But it’s the Republicans who will try to send the Change Express flying off the tracks, by killing health-care or energy reform to placate the insurance and oil industries.
Instead, I’m interested in another ethnic president — and the possibility that his very ethnicity may have some impact, positive or negative, on our desire or ability to finally get something done in Darfur.
Note, however, that last phrase: “his agenda.” As I noted, historians will regard this stimulus as distinctly Obama’s package – and once the bill reaches his desk for signature he will take full ownership of it. But since the day after Inauguration, this legislation has hardly felt like it belonged to Obama. He made a big show of acceding to various GOP tax-cut proposals during the weeks before he took the oath, but once in the 
Phelps is a 23-year-old with pockets full of dough and time on his hands. He’s part of the Pineapple Express generation, for crying out loud! How many of his peers, much less their ’60s-bred parents, really care if his idea of blowing off steam involves sucking down illicit smoke? A recent survey quoted no fewer than 42 percent of Americans who said they’ve tried pot, and the nation’s marijuana laws are steadily becoming as flaccid as the stuff supposedly renders its male users (I have no direct evidence, of course). Why is this a big deal?
One of the hoariest clichés out there is the notion that politicians “campaign in poetry, but govern in prose.” Both Obama and John McCain campaigned last fall with uplifting calls for bipartisanship – McCain because he needed to overcome the Republican brand, Obama because he wanted to run up the score and break through the “50-percent-plus-one” nightmare of the Bush years. But even now that Obama has achieved that breakthrough, he’s still governing (at least for the moment) in poetry, and Monday’s visit to the Hill was nothing if not poetic.
As the hours blissfully speed away toward the end of the Bush administration, assessments of its “legacy” continue to bog down – not over the relative weights of its accomplishments (were there any?), nor over rankings of its disastrous failures, but over an astonishing question that pretty well defines the first decade of the 21st century: Will these criminals ever be punished?
With its brevity, its already-clichéd title, its lack of hardback-itude, and its Inauguration-friendly release date, Between Barack and a Hard Place bears all the earmarks of a cash-in. But Wise should be forgiven the indiscretion, because in recent years his authorial career has suffered from exquisitely poor timing. White Like Me first hit bookstores in early 2005, and (after not exactly flying off the shelves) was already headed for the remaindered racks when Hurricane Katrina suddenly shone a brilliant light on the struggles of poor blacks in our major cities – and white America’s inattention to those struggles. Sensing that the book had just barely missed its historical moment, Wise’s publisher offered him, in effect, a mulligan: a second edition that would incorporate an “open letter” to his fellow whites about Katrina. The new version, as fate would have it, was published in late December 2007 – just a week before a gaggle of honkies caucusing in Iowa launched the Obama campaign toward the presidency. 