Have you ever had to choose one cuddly, wiggly puppy out of a litter? It’s a tough one. You want them all. But you usually end up going with the one that’s bounciest and licks your fingers the most and has the tail with the brown tip and that one little white sock.
Poor Madonna. Poor Angelina. It must be so hard to watch videos of little brown children playing in orphanages all over the world knowing you can only get a dozen or so. Madonna just found herself another one. Of course, Madonna doesn’t limit herself to orphans. She bought the last one from his poverty-stricken father.
I’m sick of hearing about it. And I’m disgusted that I saw the link to an article about Madonna’s latest acquisition on The Huffington Post today.
What is with these women? Are you convinced they’re not shallow and selfish because they buy third-world kids? I’m not. All they’re doing is accessorizing their personae. It’s sickening. Are these rich, famous, neurotic women desperately trying to give their lives some meaning, or do they just want a Turkish kid to match the Turkish carpets? An exotic pet, maybe?
Mia Farrow did it too. It bugged me back then just as much as it bugs me now. But I have some respect for Mia because she works with UNICEF, has been an adoption advocate for many years, and has lately been speaking out on the genocide in Darfur.
Oprah didn’t bring any home with her, but she essentially adopted 152 African girls, telling them she’d put them through college if they graduated from the school she had built. It’s a fine thing she’s doing, but she probably could have spent her buckage in a way that allowed her to help more people.
Josephine Baker did it. But somehow, in her case, it doesn’t bother me. She was born and raised in abject poverty, scrounging food out of trashcans with her siblings. Sent to live with her grandmother when her mother got a new boyfriend. Not allowed to use the front door when she was performing in the US. So she moved to France, where she became a star and did intelligence work for the French Resistance. She adopted a multicolored bunch of kids she called her Rainbow Tribe. I don’t question her motives so much. She knew what it was like to be poor and marginalized. At the time, she couldn’t have gotten the kind of publicity the mega-bimbos get. She was probably just trying to share her good fortune and spare some poor kids the life she’d had.
I don’t get the sense she was acting out of guilt for wealth accumulated through essentially meaningless work, or reacting to that hollow feeling you get when you have everything you could ever want and you’re still not happy…
They could be doing so much more. They could be like Mia, using their fame to draw attention to injustice. Following in the footsteps of Audrey Hepburn who, like Mia, was also a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador because she’d benefited from UNICEF assistance herself after WWII. She used her image and her money to improve the living conditions of children everywhere rather than hand-picking a few cute third-world kids like so many bracelets.
[Addendum: I just learned that Angelina is, in fact a UN Goodwill Ambassador, which mitigates my revulsion somewhat.]
Will it ever occur to these twits, when they’re dressing their dolls in designer clothes, raising them in luxury, how many starving kids could eat for a month for the price of those tennis lessons? Or the racket? Or the shoes?
They’d be better off doing what Bill Gates did and founding or contributing some of their superfluous wealth to a foundation or organization that helps all children; the sick ones, the ugly ones, the runts. Not just the picks of the litter.