Vanity Fair is doing its best to help us feel better about whatever it is we’re doing in and to Africa. They’ve painted a rainbow coalition of the bright and brainless to sell us the future vision for a new and improved Africa.

The issue is edited by everybody’s favorite sex-and-death rock and roller, Paul Hewson - that is, Bono - who remembers enough from catechism to know that sex must equal death (at least for poor people - it’s an Irish Catholic thing, you know).

If I’m being cryptic, or bitter, please excuse me.

But do have a look at the article on the miracles of Nevirapine, and tell me what it is that we’re going to do, in actual reality, with these poor folks…

If I am to believe the marketing, I must accept that all the poor and starving in Africa are actually living about as long as Europeans did in the Middle Ages, because they have normative, reproductive sex once in a while.

(Then have a look at this sex survey to see how much we do it, and figure out how we dodge that sex-death curse)…

Or this one:

“There’s a misperception that there’s a great deal of promiscuity in Africa, which is one of the potential reasons for HIV/AIDS spreading so rapidly,” said Dr. Paul van Look, director of Reproductive Health and Research at the World Health Organization, who was unconnected to the study. “But that view is not supported by the evidence.”

But, never mind, you know, because I’d hate to be in Denial about how dangerous it is for Black people to have sex in Africa (or anywhere else).

So, back to it. Everybody in Africa is going to die, unless we…. and here’s where I fall off the great ol’American Liberal Turnip Truck.

What is it, exactly, precisely, that we’re going to do, actually DO, for the people of a great many nations, who are not as wealthy as we?

Are we really going to:

• Drug 40 million people with “life-saving” (life-ending) Aids drugs?

• Put condoms on (and circumcise) a couple dozen million black penises?

• Ignore the infrastructure problems of most villages and cities in Africa, hoping that people do better with drugs that make people vomit and have diarrhea, than with a regular supply of clean, potable water?

• Infiltrate sovereign nations for the purpose of building pharma factories - for poisons - but never for anti-mosquito pesticides (that’s anti-malaria to you and me - yes, like DDT, for example)?

• Buy Gap clothing, rubbing ourselves in a warm and tender way, knowing that we’ve just helped pay for another pregnant woman’s dose of Nevirapine?

By God, I think we are.

So, what’s the upshot? How long does it last? And what are we really there for?

Let me repeat that - what are we really there for?

Besides:

• Population Control - don’t kid yourself, condoms and drugging pregnant women has one, and only one net result.

• Drug sales

• Mineral, Oil and Resource Control - Africa, for all of its poverty, is a rich, rich place for what makes markets tick and turn.

• Bodies to do labor, cheap. Even China is using Africa for their low-end labor - once and again the world’s slave market.

Now it’s up to you, you tell me what I’m missing. What are the missing pieces. Make some predictions, tell me what Africa looks like after 10 years of the Aids pogrom. I mean, program.

Is Africa in worse, or better shape?

Has the population control worked, or backfired?

Will we (the Imperium) get those resources we want, we really, really want (oil, minerals, diamonds, and food for the new nuclear power plants)?

And how long will it take before we lose interest? Before we bleed it dry, again, and move on?

Or will it, somehow, work? Will the Western influx somehow turn enough of Africa into a new…Texas?

Will we pen up the Serengeti and sell tickets? Move the local tribesmen into bee-hive apartment blocks, a la Beijing, and put them to work answering phones for our credit card companies?

I mean, what gives? What’s the future of Africa, in Bono-land?

Your thoughts, please, while I ponder the great religion of our age - the Church of Aids….