World Beat
by JOHN FEFFER | Tuesday, June 14, 2011
Vol. 6, No. 27

Foreign Policy Goes Gaga

Lady Gaga and Alice Walker don't have much in common. One dresses in red meat; the other doesn't even eat the stuff. One writes lyrics like "I want your ugly, I want your disease, I want your everything as long as it's free." The other writes The Color Purple.

But they are both cultural celebrities, and the media gravitates to them for comments. And they both have used this celebrity status to weigh in on global issues.

Alice Walker, for instance, was a passenger on the Audacity of Hope, one of the boats that tried to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza. She appeared in the first paragraph of The New York Times story on the second flotilla's formation, made her case on CNN, parried questions in a Foreign Policy interview, and prompted a disparaging Commentary commentary entitled "The Alice Walker Flotilla." Walker used her celebrity status to raise the media profile of the initiative but also to bring her own sensibility to bear on the issue. She compared the blockade-busting to the civil rights movement and spoke of her "awareness of paying off a debt to the Jewish civil rights activists who faced death to come to the side of black people in the American south in our time of need."