The Celebrity Goddess Katrina

I caught a brief glimpse of the telecast "Shelter from the Storm" last night. It was really strange. Randy Newman started it off by singing Louisianna 1927 (do we ever learn?), and he was followed by my personal gods, U2, who sang "One" with a kick ass Mary J. Blidge sharing vocal duties with Bono. I turned it off after that, but not before I saw the cheesy parts with Ellen DeGeneris and Morgan Freeman. It was cheese because it was a telethon, and those are always cheesy.

I am tired of people, mostly righties, criticizing the efforts of celebrities. Is it so hard to fathom that celebrities are people who care about others? I have seen Celine Dion slammed by so many people, many times only because they hate her music. She donated ONE MILLION DOLLARS! It's called generosity. Or how about Sean Penn, who traveled there to try to help the victims. So what if he had boat issues? At least he was there trying to do something, rather than sitting on his ass in front of a keyboard criticizing the Nayger mayor or the vacationing clown. It's more than most of us have done. (At least we were able to get Brown sent back to Washington before he made an even bigger mess.)

Kudos to the celebs for keeping politics out of it. And praise be to Mr. Clinton, who was directly asked by Steve Harvey at the BET telecast if he would have done a better job responding. Clinton, ever the diplomat, simply responded that now wasn't the time to talk about it. As for those with big mouths, people deal with frustration in different ways. Indirectly, Kayne West was right. Ask a black man. West clearly has no tact and no sense of diplomacy, but I don't think there are many who can deny the fact that if rich white folk were the ones stuck, help would've been there immediately. Those who deny it are living in Candyland.

I wonder how much was raised for the Red Cross last night. I wonder when America, ADD Nation, will become sick of Katrina, as I've already seen some bloggers commenting about how they are sick of the media coverage. Katrina isn't a one hit wonder- she's in for a pretty successful career, as it isn't everyday a country loses a major city. We are all going to be feeling the impact of this disaster for years in every aspect of our consumer lives. I wonder if people will remember when gasoline prices were two dollars. I wonder if people will remember cheap goods, buying junk they didn't need, going to Walfart, pretending like this country was infallible.