Want hope? Maybe we need to find some better heroes
Somewhere between Nelson Mandela’s glorious rugby victory in 1995 and Jeff Bezos’s looming Venice wedding extravaganza, a gaping leadership void emerged, writes Angela Mollard.
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I feel sorry for the people of Venice. The poor buggers have survived floods, cruise ships and decades of over-tourism and now they’re about to be hit with Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez’s wedding.
As if the city wasn’t already sinking under the weight of overpriced Bellinis, it’s now bracing for a billionaire bridal invasion complete with superyacht flotillas, security drones and – if Sanchez’s Parisian hen’s party is anything to go by – enough cleavage to knock out the town’s entire compliment of gondoliers.
Unbelievably, the Italian city’s bosses actually pitched to host the nuptials.
That’s right, the 1600-year-old cultural treasure and UNESCO world heritage site lobbied to become the backdrop for the Bezos “I dos”.
It’s like La Dolce Vita being remade for Amazon Prime.
Amalfi must be so upset to miss out.
Anyway, as the tech broligarchy and Sanchez’s space mates descend on the city of canals for the spectacle, I note that festivities kick off on June 24.
Which just so happens to be the 30th anniversary of South Africa, tentatively emerging from apartheid era oppression, spectacularly winning the Rugby World Cup.
Anyone old enough to remember will recall Nelson Mandela walking onto the field in Johannesburg wearing a Springbok jersey to hand the winning trophy to captain Francois Pienaar.
The stadium erupted with joy, and while Clint Eastwood’s movie Invictus captured the essence of that moment no film — however stirring — can bottle the electricity of a nation breathing together for the first time.
Oh how the world has changed in 30 years.
HOLDING OUT FOR A HERO
There was a time – hard as it may be to believe in the age of billionaire space cosplay and democracy in disrepair – when nations genuinely seemed to be moving in the right direction.
The late 1980s and early 1990s were an era charged with hope, where seismic political change unfolded not with bloodshed, but with courage and vision.
In Moscow Mikhail Gorbachev stood at the helm of a crumbling Soviet Union and, instead of clinging to power, opened his hands.
Perestroika and glasnost weren’t just policy shifts – they were philosophical acts of defiance against repression.
My kids have a picture of their Dad, a newspaper photographer, poking his head through the Berlin Wall on the day it came down in 1989.
His smile doesn’t just capture the end of the Cold War, but the beginning of possibility.
That spirit echoed across the world. South Africa, long trapped under the horror of apartheid, began its slow, painful march towards freedom and reconciliation, after President FW de Klerk released Mandela from prison after 27 years.
Ireland, too, found its way to a kind of peace in 1998 when bombs and barricades gave way to handshakes with the Good Friday Agreement.
Through it all, music pulsed with the same momentum.
Tracy Chapman captured it with Talking ‘Bout a Revolution, The Specials with Nelson Mandela and U2 with Peace on Earth.
A few years earlier, Bob Geldof, with little more than a telephone and a furious sense of injustice, dragged the world’s attention to a famine in Ethiopia with the Live Aid concert. It wasn’t perfect – leadership, activism and audacious ideas never are.
But it was purposeful. The world felt it was tilting toward progress, song by song, handshake by historic handshake.
Maybe that’s why today’s absurd parade of tech billionaires staging weddings in Venice and flexing their ambition in rocket launches feels so hollow.
We’ve traded statesmen for showmen and somewhere between Mandela’s glorious rugby victory in 1995 and Bezos’s multi-day wedding three decades later we’ve become complicit in this exchange of leadership and vision for influence and visibility.
Bezos didn’t amass 4.3 million Instagram followers by sneakily signing us up through Amazon. We chose to follow him (well, I didn’t) and in so doing we’ve now integrated him along with his space-going fiancé into our ordinary lives.
Whether we like it or not we’re now engaged in their story whether that’s Sanchez and her trail of celebrity mates hen partying in Paris, or Bezos doing bicep curls on his superyacht. They produce content to feed their brand unlike that scruffy Mr Geldof who wrote a song to feed a continent.
And why wouldn’t they?
NORMALISING NARCISSISM
The likes of Trump and Putin and Elon Musk haven’t just normalised narcissism, they’ve turned it into a geopolitical strategy.
When Putin marches into sovereign nations with impunity and Trump redefines disgrace as a business model it’s no wonder the rich like Bezos discard humility for canal-jamming nuptials and start grandiosely talking about “moving heavy industry to space”.
Perhaps Mars will offer to host his next (intergalactic themed) wedding.
Frankly, we need to start choosing better heroes. Because the power of the tech bros isn’t just in their billions but in the attention we hand over to them.
If we want to reignite that old hope – the kind that once stitched nations together and made ordinary people feel they were part of something momentous – then we need to ignore Bezos, his pneumatic bride and their vanity wedding. History will remember those who showed up, not showed off.
ANGE’S A-LIST
INSTA INSPO: If you want a pop of goodness and humanity in your Instagram feed, follow Christopher Ward’s @modelstrangers. A street photographer who interviews ordinary people, he has a knack of extracting grace with the simplest of storytelling.
CRUMBLE HACK: My family loves every sort of crumble but I used to find rubbing the butter into the flour such a faff until I discovered Donna Hay’s Easy Apple Crumble recipe (online) which simply melts the butter. I also make double crumble quantities and keep a batch in the freezer.
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