Blame Greed, Not Nature

One dead, 19 others injured at Linkin Park concert in Cape Town.

And so many people blaming "Mother Nature" for the tragedy.

Well, let's take a look. What was Lucozade - a face of Big Pharma GlaxoSmithKline, doing at the concert in the first place?

Linkin Park is a successful purveyor of popular music, and as such has been backed by the corporate music industry until the general populace is just about forced to like it. Me, I think their music is low-level garbage - but what do I know? - my musical tastes are not informed or coerced by huge media corporations.

So Lucozade leapt at the chance to increase their sales  improve their media coverage, to which end they had hired dozens of attractive temporary corporate shills salespeople and erected an enormous billboard upheld by (unanchored, an eyewitness testifies) pillars bearing their logo.

When, as is not uncommon in Cape Town, the winds reached gale force and people struggled to keep upright while walking, this whole structural edifice of low-level communication...fell over. Injuring 20 of the salespeople and killing one of them.

Big business wanting to increase their visibility by being seen at the cool gigs is not, in my anarchical outlook, forgivable at all. What it boils down to is greed. Which is what powers much of our culture. From popular music bands which I wouldn't listen to if you tied me down with a pair of earphones, to lifestyle consumables like the rabidly unhealthy "energy drinks" which wreck livers while allowing us to pretend that we're really cool, too, the whole system is run and maintained by corporate greed. Little men chasing the illusion of happiness through wealth and, they think, power.

It's all so damned transparent that it makes me howl with laughter. When I'm not weeping for their victims - every one of us - that is.