Bono the useful idiot

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Counterpunch, June 4, 2002

Bono the Useful Idiot
Ballad of the Sun and the Moon
by Dave Marsh

I can pinpoint the nadir of rock music's first half-century: That
wire service picture of Bono standing with U.S. Treasury Secretary
Paul O'Neill, the two of them wearing local African costumes
somewhere in Africa. Bono's idiocy is here complete, since the most
benighted tourist with a skin full of rum would know better than to
allow this shot to circulate. But tourists are, for the most part,
innocent of much beyond blind pursuit of pleasure. With his African
junket alongside O'Neill, Bono practices actual evil. The trip's
purpose is to endorse the power of rich nations to control the fate
of poor ones, so long as the occasional bone is thrown.

The junket also enhances the image of one of the rottenest characters
in the Bush regime. Next time he goes to Jamaica, Bono might take a
jaunt around Jamaica to see firsthand the depredations of Alcoa's
bauxite mining O'Neill ran Alcoa for 12 years. Before that he ran
International Paper, devastating much of the Black Belt of the
southern United States. That is, O'Neill played a major role in
defiling the places where both the blues and reggae were born.

Bono portrays himself as the latest in a line of rock daredevils
trying to change the world. In reality, everything Bono does-starting
with his support of the Irish and English governments-- attempts to
*stabilize* the world, freezing the globe's poor into subservience.
All the rockers who changed-and are changing-the world go about it
differently. Instead of spending their time pretending not to suck up
to power at its most loathsome, they make music that delves into
their own lives and the lives of the people they love. Those who
truly work for a different kind of world use their talent and fame to
tell the stories that aren't being told anywhere else. They make
records like Alejandro Escovedo's By the Hand of the Father (Texas
Music Group).

The album, based on a stage play Escovedo cowrote, offers beautiful,
haunting music, using strings as well as guitars to offset rock
riffs. Although a couple of the songs ("The Ballad of the Sun and the
Moon," "With These Hands") appear on earlier Escovedo albums, much of
the best music is either score, with cello as the lead instrument, or
versions of specific Mexican idioms. ("Mexicano Americano" raves on
regardless.)

The first time I ever heard Alejandro, he sang Woody Guthrie's
"Deportees," the great ballad of the migrant farmworker. By the Hand
of the Father sometimes feels like a first-hand expansion of that
story, but a lot of it is tied up in issues as quotidian as
homesickness, the hope of romance and the agony when life ruins it.
That is, it is the life of the migrant made nearly universal-so
universal that the detailed differences glare unmistakably from the
tapestry.

Escovedo never stops noticing how poor these people-his people-are.
That fact carries the weight of all his tales. But he puts his finger
on the issue just once: "You see the wicked prowl across the border /
They say death's the only peace the poor understand."

This is not anybody trying to "speak truth to power." It's a
recognition that the powerful know the truth and that part of the
truth is that nobody knows much at all about the poor as human
individuals, and that if you're poor enough, making a living from one
day to the next may come to constitute a legitimate triumph. Those
two bare lines contain all the things you never learn sitting in
conference rooms and traveling from town to town with a potentate's
entourage.

Alejandro Escovedo speaks the power OF truth. Rock music cannot tell
all of it, but for millions, all of it cannot be told any longer
without rock, and the music that came after it, and the music that
came before it. It certainly cannot be told while standing in the
shadows, smirking an implicit endorsement of the way things are.


--
Louis Proyect, lnp3@xxxxxxxxx on 06/05/2002

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