Money to Burn

This week, I have hilariously decided to write about the inconsistency and choosiness with which rich people (the 1%, the great very-washed, the avec-culottes) donate to charitable causes.

So Australia seems pretty fucked right now, and infographics illustrating the relative size of the total area destroyed by fires are terrifying; almost equal to the entirety of England. But people are donating money, just like they did when Notre Dame caught on fire. And when you compare the size of Notre Dame (a very basic overestimate gives us a ground area of 6.1 sq km) to the area of Australia destroyed by fire (roughly 100,000 sq km), you realise that you could fit roughly 16,250 overestimated Notre Dames into the space of Australia’s destroyed area.

Now I’m not saying that the amount of money it takes to rebuild part of the Notre Dame is the same as restoring an equivalent area of land in Australia. Notre Dame has very exacting designs and proportions, and of course ideally it would look like no fire has occurred at all.
And in Australia you just have houses destroyed, endangered wildlife possibly made extinct with a total of a billion wild animals killed. Although to be fair, some of those animals have very exacting designs and proportions, and of course ideally they would look like they haven’t been killed at all.

And so, logic would tell us that the amount of money donated to each would be reflected by that huge difference, so…

The total amount of money donated to Notre Dame was roughly:
$1 billion!
Wow! What an incredible feat! People must really care about such a large building, possibly because of all the history it has, and all the animals and… No just because it’s old, and because although the donors aren’t fully ‘religious’, and don’t think that God is a guy with a big white beard, they are sort of ‘spiritual’ maybe, and believe that there’s ‘something’. And if there is a god, it can’t hurt that they’ve donated so much money to something which he’s probably a big fan of.

And, the total amount of money donated to the Australian bush fires relief efforts is roughly:
$500 million!
Wow! What an incredible feat! People must really care half as much about the death of almost thirty people, and a fuck ton of animals as they do about a big building! And if there is a god, it probably looks awful that only half as much has been donated to prevent the deaths of things which He ‘created’ (people, animals), compared to something which we ‘created’ (being inside).

It sure seems like the only things worth donating to, are ones shown in action movie establishing shots. If the Sydney Opera House had also started to burn, I’m sure it would have gained more attention from the world’s richest than

This depresses me!

Let’s talk about something totally unrelated.
How about that I recently found out about a campaign to get Big Ben to ring when the UK leaves the EU on the 31st January. And because Big Ben is currently undergoing renovations at the moment, it would cost an estimated £500,000 to get this to happen.
But don’t worry! £200,000 has already been raised, since the Prime Minister himself suggested the fund be set up. It would involve a delay to the current renovation work, installing a temporary floor, and the biggest drawback that seems to have gone unmentioned, the symbolic burning of half a million pounds to appease blue-passport fetishists, whose pants get tight at the thought of a bell being chimed, as though it can symbolise anything other than the death knell of multiculturalism.
It is a fucking clock (yes I know Big Ben is actually the name of the bell, and the building is St. Stephen’s Tower), and the idea that it may not chime at the moment of peak British jingoism is detestable enough for people to donate money to hear a noise at a time. How about someone just gets a fucking recording and plays it through some speakers inside the tower, and then does anything useful with that money?

Similar campaigns include arranging for fish & chips to rain from the sky (and in the north, gravy). And a genetically engineered bulldog the size of a Land Rover Discovery to begin a month-long tour of the nation’s beaches, trained to smoke a Churchill-style cigar, while offering rides to young children.

 

Next time on the bandwagon, I try to actually be funny, and attempt more detachment from social issues by refusing to take a stance on ISIS.