The G8 v a GR8 protest

On the way back down from my brother's stag nite in Mayo I finally got round to listening to some lectures by Jello Biafra, former lead singer with the Dead Kennedys and American green party member. He's a perceptive critic of the new global order and though he's angry (why wouldm't he be) he's not without optimism. Occasionally, though, he'll come out with a bizarre statement like "we (protestors) stopped the Vietnam war", which is of course, bollocks, as what stopped the war was igniminious military defeat for the US.

In the last few years I've become a bit sceptical about the efficacy of protesting, though it didn't stop me getting almost arrested in the run-up to the Iraq war.

I'm still scpetical as to whether showing up in Edinburgh for the G8 summit, even after my fellow countryman Bob Geldof imprecated me and a million others to come and hopefully convince the leaders of those nations to be a bit nicer to those not quite as well off to themselves.

Then they went back a bit and said that they only meant a million in a metaphorical sense, although around 2 million showed up in Rome for the Iraq protests a couple of years ago. Funny thing is the cops probably said there was only 150,000.

Maybe he meant a million in the sense that Russia is a democracy. And if India isn't a bigger industrial power than Canada already, it surely will be in a few years time.

I'm hoping that the whole thing will be a bit like Braveheart with the Scottish cops turning against their Anglo-Saxon overlords and joining with Celtic warriors like myself who know in their Jungian folk memories what it's like to be exploited by brutal uber-capitalism. But at I'm not holding my breath, at least until I get to the toilets if they're anything like they are in Trainspotting.

Then there's Live 8 down in London, which isn't that unlike the summit in terms of it's eurocentricity, with only one artist from Africa, the place where almost all modern western music comes from.

Then their distrubting tickets by txt msg lottery, a technology which is unknown to the vast majority of Africans. If that isn't bad enough Gordon Brown says he approves of the protests, just as Bertie claimed that the 100,000 that marched in Dublin were on his side.

Still, it would be nice to know that while the world leaders are arguing about the efficacy of aid payments, how to control Africa's population and get food from the plates of fat westerners to hungry Africans and then agreeing to do whatever George Bush says, there'll be a million of us out there who know all the solutions to the worlds problems if only the world's pols would pay some attention.

So maybe I will head along.