Thing of the Week: Kony 2012

You can say what you want about the Kony 2012 viral YouTube kickoff video. Or, as I did, sit there wordlessly flipping off your computer screen for 30 minutes. But it isn’t entirely off-base in its flowery introduction, where it stokes the ego of its largely Facebook-driven audience by waxing rhapsodic about the transformative power of social media.

Indeed, social networks and the 24-hour rapid-fire Internet navel gaze actually got this kind of right just about instantly. The backlash against Invisible Children and their campaign commercial was the initial lash, its tone and target instantly held up to scrutiny and ridicule.

Which may, instinctively and understandably, lead you to consider jumping into the backlash against the backlash. Sure, the Kony video should be utterly insulting to the viewer’s intelligence. Like a jeans commercial set to Walt Whitman, the methods employed by the filmmaker are rightly suspect.

Warning flags include:

• The first several minutes are, as mentioned, a love letter to all the stuff we do on the Internet when we’re not accomplishing anything. (Evidently, ADD is the rich soil in which social justice will flourish in the 21st century.)

  A heinous, manipulative musical score.

• The sudden thrusting into the spotlight of an obscure Ugandan war criminal as the purported, overwhelming “Evil to Watch” in 2012, along with absolutely zero context.
• An adorable Aryan child praising his father — the director — for his humanitarian work, such as the very film you’re watching.
• A call to action that involves purchasing a merchandise kit and tweeting George Clooney.
• More than 20 seconds of Senator James Inhofe, outside of a Daily Show clip reel.

It would probably be wrong to heap scorn on a piece of activism simply because it opted to ape every single Allstate commercial ever produced in order to get its message out there. You could forgive somebody for taking the “low road” and working with what the culture hands them in order to help people whose lives are being stolen and terrorized.

Imagine, for instance, if somebody offered to free your own daughter from a shady sex trafficking operation, simply by bankrolling a trilogy of Cameron Crowe films.

Now that every media outlet and its sister publication has gotten around to debunking this thing, noting the odd timing (Kony and friends have been a relatively neutered force since 2006, they tell me, and Invisible Children has partnered with some pretty brutal folks in the region themselves) we’re left with a situation that is all kinds of distasteful. It’s a scenario where our media is actually doing its job to assist us in not caring too much about a microcosmic example of tragic horror in Africa.

And finally, we can now measure the remarkably few degrees of separation between the way some of our Facebook friends react to stories of kidnapped child soldiers and images of chimpanzees bottle-feeding kittens.