A reader writes:

During a recent bout of 'flu, I had the lyrics to "Where Is The Love?" running around my head as terrible pop songs do, for hours and hours while I tried to sleep. It really is a horribly vacuous, pretentious song, from the faux-chin-scratching rhetorical emptiness of the title to the really horrific rhymes (And to discriminate only generates hate / And if you hatin you're bound to get irate … thank you, Will.i.am, for clearing that up) to the attempts at subversiveness: But we still got terrorists here livin / In the USA the big CIA  … Yeah, take that, establishment! 

But the real toe curler is the music video, in which a bunch of multi-millionaire pop stars wander around troubled parts of our poor suffering world and help out by, er, sticking question marks onto things (which is a good visual metaphor for how these people ever became and remained popular). It's like watching a bunch of high school kids who've just heard about the poverty in Africa put on a play about it, thinking themselves very noble and, like, deep.