Re: [Marxism] Saint Bono

[David Powers <cyborgk@xxxxxxxxx>]

I've disliked Bono (despite liking a couple older U2 songs) for a
while, but wasn't fully aware of what the guy represented. Nice to
find out that my gut reaction was spot on.

~David

On Fri, Mar 20, 2009 at 12:19 AM, J Rothermel <jayroth6@xxxxxxx> wrote:
> http://counterpunch.org/marsh03192009.html
>
> March 19, 2009
>
>
>  /*Big Scar on the Horizon */
>
>
>  *Sir Bono: the Knight Who Fled From His Own Debate *
>
> By DAVE MARSH
>
> As CounterPunch and Rock and Rap Confidential <http://www.rockrap.com/>
> disclosed in September, last May U2’s Bono confronted Irish journalist
> Gavin Martin and myself in the lobby of Dublin’s Merion Hotel. He asked
> what I’d been working on. I said “the premise that celebrity politics
> has been a pretty much complete failure.” Bono replied that he wanted to
> debate the topic in public. He reiterated the challenge the next
> evening. The witnesses included U2’s manager Paul McGuinness and my
> wife, Barbara Carr, among others.
>
> I made sure that Sirius Satellite Radio, which was to broadcast the
> debate, knew about Bono’s invitation. By mid-June, U2’s New York office
> confirmed the plan, asking only that it be delayed until U2 finished
> recording its next album. I kept it public via RRC and my Sirius show,
> Kick Out the Jams.
>
> In November, U2 manager Paul McGuinness rang me. After some brief
> personal palaver—I like Paul even though I know he’s alluded to me as a
> “Trotskyist” behind my back—McGuinness sheepishly said “Bono has asked
> me to ask you if he can withdraw” from the debate.
>
> I said “Sure.” McGuinness expressed gratitude that I was taking it so well.
>
> “Of course,” I added, “this was a public challenge. Backing out’s not
> gonna be private.” I did not ask why Bono ducked the debate. Maybe he’d
> come to his senses, as his apologetics for world capitalism
> disintegrated with the stock, housing and employment markets. Maybe he
> was too busy preparing the banalities he’d blare on the new album.
>
> In the wake of the New Depression generated by Bono’s tutors in world
> finance, it’s hardly necessary to issue a point by point refutation of
> his statements about how the world works,. Based on Bono’s response to
> criticism of U2’s tax avoidance, he plans to carry to the grave the
> ardently stupid globalization orthodoxy of Forbes, the Wall Street
> cheerleading rag he co-owns. Can there be anyone else who’s ventured a
> deep thought in the last several months who still believes that the only
> path to change involves bending the knee to the powerful?
>
> As for the lyrics, don’t jump to the wrong conclusion. It can’t be
> denied that Larry Mullen, Adam Clayton and the Edge can still make
> fascinating music. Bono’s yelped vocals are another matter, his hollow
> lyrics--where every platitude yields to an obscurantist pretension and
> back again--yet another. Unfortunately, even if he’d come up with a
> lyric as great as “One,” Bono also carries into each project his
> off-stage political pronouncements, and his fawning affiliations with
> war criminals such as Tony Blair and George W. Bush.
>
> I don’t know why Bono spit the bit on debating these issues in a public
> forum with a well-informed antagonist. Maybe he decided that he’d fucked
> up and was about to lower himself by going head to head with a
> journalist. Maybe he doesn’t want to deal on the spot with descriptions
> of his repeated appearances at the conferences of the leading capitalist
> nations where he’s yet to ask his first hard question about anything but
> Africa; about his settling for promises from world leaders that patently
> weren’t going to be kept, and never doing more than mewing when they
> weren’t; about why it is that Zambian economist Dambisa Moyo, by no
> means an anti-capitalist, observes that she met him “at a party to raise
> money for Africans, and there were no Africans in the room, except for
> me,” or why so many other Africans have complained that he claims to
> speak for them but has never so much as asked their permission. In
> regard to the last, I did receive more courtesy than Andrew Mwenda, the
> Ugandan journalist Bono cursed for raising such questions at an
> economics conference. (But then, I’m white and Celtic-American.)
>
> It certainly isn’t my fault that I have to say “maybe” about all of
> this. Bono never got back to me, or had any of his handlers get back to
> me, about the ground rules for our projected “debate”--his term, not
> mine. I’d have settled for an honest interview although “debate” would
> have been more fun, even though the result was inevitable. No matter how
> many people sided with my being able to see through the kind of thing
> William Burroughs once poetically dubbed “a thin tissue of horseshit” it
> wouldn’t be enough to outweigh Big Time Pop Star status.
>
> I don’t know. More to the point, you can’t know either.
>
> U2 could be in a fair amount of trouble. The band is old by rock
> standards, and on the cover of Rolling Stone Bono looked much older than
> the rest because of a physical makeover that tries to deny it. No Line’s
> first single flopped on the radio. The band’s decision to have its song
> publishing company flee Ireland for a tax haven in the Netherlands has
> been subject to protests in the streets of Dublin and has no obvious
> justification, despite Bono’s fatuous counterclaim that it is his
> critics who are the hypocrites because free-market values were what
> created the “Celtic Tiger” of Dublin’s capitalist boom economy. The
> Tiger’s death throes look to be particularly messy, in part because of
> capital flight of just U2’s kind. The band’s attempt to alter the Dublin
> skyline with its Clarence Hotel expansion is another example of its
> ruinous distance from everyday Irish reality.
>
> Bono’s self-promotion fares much better on this side of the Atlantic
> than at home. For instance, he got away scot-free in the American press
> after declaring during the Inauguration Concert, “What a thrill for four
> Irish boys from the north side of Dublin to honor you sir, Barack Obama,
> to be the next president of the United States.” But Shane Hegarty wrote
> in The Irish Times that only one of the band now lives on Dublin’s
> working class north side while Bono has lived more of his life on the
> south side.
>
> “During the band's performance of ‘In The Name of Love,’” wrote Hegarty,
> “he described Martin Luther King's dream as ‘Not just an American
> dream--also an Irish dream, a European dream, an African dream, an
> Israeli dream . . .’ And then, following a long pause reminiscent of a
> man who'd just realized he'd left the gas on, he added, ‘. . . and also
> a Palestinian dream.’ This was his big shout out to the Palestinians…
> You can't help but marvel at this latest expression of Bono's Sesame
> Street view of the world. Hey Middle East, we just have to have a dream
> to get along.
>
> “Just ignore the sound of those loud explosions and concentrate on
> Bono's voice.”
>
> So listen, Bono, if you decide to suck it up and face me, I’m still
> available. I can’t win a debate, we both know that, and why you’d want
> to continue to look feeble and cowardly when you have virtually nothing
> to lose… well, that’s another question I suppose you’ll never be asked.
>
> It doesn’t mean that those questions are going to go away. Maybe for the
> tamed tigers of the American pop press, but not for me, or for those
> people in the streets of Dublin calling you a tax cheat, or for the
> Africans who feel insulted by your ignorance of their lives, or for that
> matter, the fans who wonder why you insist on siding continually, if
> slyly, with the powerful against the powerless.
>
>
> MAN O’ WAR
>
> In 2005, the annual Man of Peace award was given to Bob Geldof, despite
> his promotion of the bloodthirsty Bush and Blair regimes. In
> mid-December the Nobel Peace Prize laureates who give the award gathered
> in Paris to bestow it on an even worse choice: Bono.
>
> Bono is no man of peace--he has yet to speak out against any war. Bono
> is part owner of Pandemic/Bioware, producers of Mercenaries 2, a video
> game which simulates an invasion of Venezuela. Last year Bono met with
> US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates to discuss plans to set up a new
> U.S. military command for Africa. Forbes, the magazine Bono co-owns,
> constantly beats the drums for war (Bono says he was attracted to the
> magazine because it has a “consistent philosophy”).
>
> Like Sir Bob, Bono sings the praises of some of the most warlike public
> figures. It starts with Dubya and Blair—Bono praised the UK prime
> minister for “doing the things he believed in.” He clearly meant to
> include massive British involvement in the war in Iraq. Bono also has
> nothing but praise for arch-reactionaries such as Jesse Helms and Billy
> Graham. In the video for Pat Boone’s video, “Thank You Billy Graham,”
> Bono intones “I give thanks for the sanity of Billy Graham, a singer of
> the human spirit.” Interesting. In 1966, Graham followed LBJ to the
> podium at the National Prayer Breakfast to give a ringing endorsement of
> the war in Vietnam. “There are those,” Graham said, “who have tried to
> reduce Christ to a genial and innocuous appeaser; but Jesus said ‘You
> are wrong—I have come as a firesetter and sword-wielder. I am come to
> send fire down on earth!” Sing that human spirit, Billy—you’ve got Bono
> on harmonies. Indeed, surrounded by America’s most hawkish politicians,
> Bono gave a fawning keynote speech at the 2008 National Prayer
> Breakfast. In a recent interview with the British music magazine Q, U2
> drummer Larry Mullen said he “cringes” when he sees Bono hanging out
> with George Bush and Tony Blair, adding that those two world leaders
> should be tried as “war criminals.”
>
> It might seem strange that a group of Nobel Peace Prize winners would
> anoint Bono as a man of peace. But maybe not. Past Peace Prize winners
> include Henry Kissinger, puppetmaster of the violent overthrow of
> Chile’s Salvador Allende and architect of the bombing of Cambodia, and
> Bono’s buddy Al Gore, who backed both Gulf wars after voting for the
> first-strike MX missile.
>
> One of the people who might have injected some new thinking into the Man
> of Peace festivities in Paris is Tookie Williams. A co-founder of the
> Crips gang in LA who became a spokesman against the gang life and an
> author of children’s books while on Death Row, Williams was nominated
> five times for the Nobel Peace Prize (and once for the Nobel Prize in
> literature). Of course, Williams could not attend because he died of a
> lethal injection at San Quentin on December 13, 2005 after California
> governor Arnold Schwarzenegger refused worldwide pleas for clemency.
>
> Yet on October 23, there was Bono, the “man of peace,” gushing with
> praise for Arnold as he gave yet another keynote, this time at the
> California Women’s Conference in Long Beach. Other speakers included the
> Governator, his wife Maria Shriver, and Madeline Albright. Albright,
> Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State, once said on national television when
> asked how she could justify the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children as a
> result of Clinton/Gore sanctions: “We think the price is worth it.”
>
> Bono made no mention of the dramatic increase in California poverty
> caused by Schwarzenegger’s pro-corporate policies. Not a word about the
> two million children in the state who go hungry or about the immigrants
> hunted in the streets as if they were animals escaped from a zoo. The
> main theme of Bono’s rambling talk was poverty in Africa and Africa
> only, although he did make brief mention of how as an aspiring musician
> he was inspired by the Clash (ironic since they were artists who made
> their opposition to war very explicit).
>
> Despite the inspiration that many people take from the anthems Bono has
> written, there is not one shred of evidence that he disagrees on any
> issue—war, tax shelters, immigration—with the power brokers he wants us
> to believe are the last best hope of mankind.
>
> *Dave Marsh* (along with Lee Ballinger) edits Rock & Rap Confidential
> <http://www.rockrap.com/>, one of CounterPunch's favorite newsletters,
> now available for free by emailing: rockrap@xxxxxxx
> <mailto:rockrap@xxxxxxx>. Marsh's definitive and monumental biography of
> Bruce Springsteen has just been reissued, with 12,000 new words, under
> the title Two Hearts
> <http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/041596928X/counterpunchmaga>.
> Marsh can be reached at: marsh6@xxxxxxxxxxxxx <mailto:marsh6@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
>
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