The Frontman

by Harry Browne

  Among liberals there was, it is true, some grumbling when, from 2001, Bono’s friendly persuasion started to provide ‘caring’ cover for a Republican White House rather than a Democratic one. But such grumbling is a mere artefact of the partisan divide in the US, where the distinction between the two parties hides the fact that they have few substantial differences. What substantially divided the likes of Summers and Sperling, on the one hand, and Bush treasury secretary Paul O’Neill, on the other, that should have rendered O’Neill ineligible for an African safari with Bono? In reality, the differences were scant, and if Bono could charm one side, why not the other?

  O’Neill was a more literally rapacious capitalist than most of his peers: before his spell in cabinet he had run the ecologically devastating Alcoa aluminium company, a scourge of landscapes and water supplies with its mining and processing operations around the world. O’Neill has said he initially refused to meet Bono: ‘I thought he was just some pop star who wanted to use me.’49 Perish the thought. But Bono soon got access to O’Neill, as to everyone else. By June 2001 Bono was sufficiently defensive about his charm offensive with the widely despised new administration to whine: ‘It’s much more glamorous to be on the barricades with your handkerchief over your nose than it is to have a bowler and a briefcase and go to work … But … that’s the way to get the work done. It’s uncool. It’s incredibly unhip. But it’s the way to get it done.’50

  If Bono was suffering a glamour deficit, he at least had what few on the barricades could aspire to: the adoring screams of his fans to comfort him, as U2 continued to tour. It was reported that he would hop on a plane immediately after a gig and dash to Washington for meetings first thing in the morning. The Bush White House increasingly liked the cut of his jib. Condoleezza Rice, then serving as national security adviser, later told the New York Times that the administration had been working on ways to ‘rebuild a consensus about foreign assistance’.

  Rice was surprised to learn that Bono took the hard-headed view that ‘there’s a responsibility for the recipient’ as well as for the donor. In fact, Bono championed a new paradigm [sic] in which aid would be conditioned not only on need but on demonstrated capacity to use that aid effectively – which was precisely the kind of reform the administration had been thinking of.51

  Leaving aside the nonsense about Bono’s startling new paradigm under which aid should be spent ‘effectively’, it’s not hard to translate this from Times-speak. The White House was pleased that Bono was on board with the sort of ‘conditionalities’ on aid that First World governments and institutions had been demanding from developing countries for decades.

  After 9/11, it perhaps became a little harder to sell development assistance in Washington. However, Rice and secretary of state Colin Powell were keen to ensure that US foreign policy was seen to have a non-military dimension, and Bono and others were frequently heard to conjoin the ‘war on terror’ with a ‘war on poverty’: as the New York Times put it, paraphrasing Bono’s argument, ‘fragile states could not be allowed to become failed states, as Afghanistan had been.’52 In early 2002, the White House called in Jamie Drummond, the English Jubilee 2000 campaigner who was by now something like what officials might call Bono’s ‘policy guy’, both an adviser and a representative.

  … Drummond recalls, he was ‘summoned to Washington and asked not to leave.’ In a series of closed-door meetings, he says, he worked with White House officials on the details of an aid program based on the principles Bono had proposed … But the administration wanted something from Bono in return – his imprimatur. [Rice said:] ‘It’s great to have a person who would not normally be identified with the president’s development agenda as part of it.’53

  It probably did no harm that, in the midst of all this talking, Bono appeared on the cover of Time magazine flashing the inside of a jacket that appeared to be lined with the Stars and Stripes. The giant text read: ‘Can Bono Save the World?’54

  In May 2002 Bono’s schedule and that of Treasury Secretary O’Neill collided for ten days as they palled around Africa on what was described as a fact-finding mission, to press coverage that initially seemed as much bemused as impressed, the rock star and the cabinet member being some people’s idea of an odd couple. Appearances can be deceiving, however: despite the quarter-century difference in age, the men proved to have a lot in common. They bonded over plans for improving African drinking water, and O’Neill successfully ‘tried to impress on Bono the liberating power of the global market’, explaining as they visited factories ‘that Africa would benefit more from even a modest expansion of trade than from a radical increase in aid’.55 Bono later recalled that O’Neill constantly told him ‘the future of Africa is in the hands of business and commerce. And I knew that to be sort of true, but not as much as I needed to …’56 Thus, in Bono’s own version of the trip, it helped convert him to a fuller embrace of market principles as a solution to poverty. The Washington Post, firmly in ‘impressed’ mode, said the trip signalled a ‘momentous alliance between liberals and conservatives to launch a fresh assault on global poverty’.57 Once again, the media cast Bono at the centre of an unlikely conciliation story.

  Bono’s oft-quoted joke about that trip, ‘I’m not a cheap date’, would prove somewhat embarrassing, however, as the Bush administration slid backwards on even the relatively modest development-aid targets that had been agreed; meanwhile, O’Neill’s enthusiasms fell on the president’s deaf ears, and he was fired a few months after their African trip.

  Economist Robert Pollin responded to the Bono–O’Neill trip with a devastating analysis of the neoliberal assumptions that both men, despite their alleged differences, took for granted. Pollin pointed out that it was precisely the insistence on free and open markets in the developing world that had inhibited growth there, compared to an earlier period when ‘developmental states’ had been allowed to pursue their own industrial and trade policies with an emphasis on domestic development. Assuming even the most enormous increase in aid envisaged by Bono, Pollin showed that ‘Bono plus Paul O’Neill’ neoliberalism was actually costing poor and moderate-income countries $375 billion annually, compared to the growth they might have enjoyed by embracing the policies (and thus the growth rates) of the pre-neoliberal 1960s and 1970s.58 Such simple but profoundly political mathematics was literally beyond the bounds of Bono’s thinking, as he stuck firmly within the corporate Washington consensus about which O’Neill was educating him.

  During and after this time, Bono would steadfastly insist that the political assistance, the imprimatur, he had rendered to the Republican White House had been worthwhile, and the reason he could say that with any credibility was what he saw as crucial progress on AIDS.

  HEARING AIDS: PROGRESS AND COSTS ON HIV

  Bono had been aware of the persuasive power of AIDS among some American conservatives before Bush took office. In one account of his famous September 2000 meeting with Jesse Helms, he recalled that his explanations of debt weren’t getting anywhere. So ‘I started talking about Scripture. I talked about AIDS as the leprosy of our age.’ The senator’s eyes began to well up as Bono explained that ‘married women and children were dying of AIDS, and governments burdened by debt couldn’t do a thing about it’.59

  When George W. Bush came to office in January 2001, Bush used the same arguments on him and his officials. Helms helped get Bono a meeting with Bush: Bono brought the president an Irish Bible and talked to him about all of the Good Book’s injunctions to help the poor.60

  In an interview with CBS News in 2005, Bono appears to take credit for getting the US Christian Right involved with the AIDS issue.

  I was very angry that [conservative Christians] were not involved more in the AIDS emergency. I was saying, ‘This is the leprosy that we read about in the New Testament, you know. Christ hung out with the lepers. But you’re ignoring the AIDS emergency … How can you?’ And, you know, they said, ‘Well, you’re right, actually. We have been. And we�
�re sorry. We’ll get involved.’ And they did.61

  Even allowing for the simplifications of a TV soundbite, Bono’s imaginary exchange with ‘conservative Christians’ – in which he speaks to them collectively, ‘angry’ like a prophet, and they apologise and repent – seems just a tad egomaniacal. However, if there is one set of achievements about which Bono can be justifiably puffed-up, it is his role – and that of the organisation he helped to establish in 2002, the awkwardly named DATA (Debt AIDS Trade Africa) – in lobbying for funding for the provision of anti-retroviral drugs for people with HIV in Africa. This was by no means the solo effort his quote might suggest, but his work among US Christians, including a short ‘Heart of America’ bus tour to photo-op the grassroots in 2002, did help to produce, in 2003, President Bush’s five-year ‘Pepfar’ (the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief). This was promised as $15 billion over five years, and it delivered on that promise. Funding for African AIDS became a rare ‘political safe zone’ in Washington.62 Again, you can always argue, accurately, that the problem needed more money than that, but alongside other efforts by DATA and its successor, the ONE campaign, in seeking care for Africans with AIDS, there was tangible good done for hundreds of thousands of people – some of whom would spontaneously tell visitors that they got the drugs that saved their lives ‘from Bono’. It would be foolish to deny these achievements, even while recognising that, in a celebrity- and media-driven culture, the distribution of the credit for them may be somewhat distorted.

  But if we are giving credit to Bono, we should also see if there are items in the debit column on this issue. What were some of the costs of the particular form of his campaigning on AIDS? They are significant, though of course no one can pretend to measure them against the lives saved by the work in which he played a part.

  Firstly, when the Christian Right boarded the Bono AIDS bandwagon, they didn’t leave their sexual morality at home. Bono had appealed to them precisely by emphasising the sexual innocence of so many of Africa’s HIV-positive people (‘married women and children’), and the aid, when it came through Pepfar, reflected that emphasis. As the New York Times put it, in an otherwise favourable profile, Bono did not

  see fit to remonstrate with [Bush official Randall] Tobias over the damage that may have been done by the AIDS program’s ideologically inspired guidelines: a requirement that one-third of prevention funds go to programs promoting abstinence and sexual fidelity, stringent restrictions on the use of condoms and even a demand that groups receiving funds must formally oppose prostitution. An editorial in The Economist characterized Pepfar as ‘too much morality, too little sense.’63

  The Bush AIDS funding didn’t explicitly reject condoms, but suggested limiting their use to ‘at risk’ groups, meaning gay men and prostitutes, rather than, say, married couples, among whom a great deal of HIV transmission was happening. On the ground in Africa, organisations perceived the Americans as hostile to condoms, and stopped promoting them in the hope of attracting and keeping US funding.64

  As the New York Times article goes on to note, the Bush administration was less generous with international efforts against AIDS, such as the multilateral ‘Global Fund’, where it couldn’t make the moral rules. Helping Africans with AIDS became, for Bush and his like, a matter of saving women and children – and, even then, with hesitation over condom promotion – rather than of standing up for the rights of all people to vital healthcare.

  Moreover, Bono’s emphasis on ‘innocent victims’ may have largely worked for Africa, where HIV was so often heterosexually transmitted, but it may also have been counter-productive for advancing the cause of the less photogenic millions of people with AIDS elsewhere in the world. That meant predominantly (as the subtitle of Nancy Stoller’s 1997 book on AIDS politics calls them) the ‘queers, whores and junkies’ who had built a global movement in the face of devastating prejudice in the first two decades of the disease’s spread. Even in Africa, gay men are far more likely to be HIV-positive than straight men, and a recent report suggests that sexual minorities may be the losers in the long run: the American evangelical Christians that Bono encouraged into Africa are ‘colonizing’ and ‘transforming’ sexual politics in several countries on the continent, with homosexual and reproductive rights under threat.65

  It is also impossible to evaluate Bush’s Pepfar fully without noting that, in the next paragraph of the State of the Union speech in which the president announced his AIDS plan, he spoke of his intention to invade Iraq. The two issues were clearly conjoined by Bush, under the ever-flexible auspices of humanitarianism. (There is much more about Iraq in Chapter 3.)

  If Bono chose to make conservative allies and arguments in working to treat AIDS, his organisation DATA was also conservative in other ways. Like the Global Fund to Treat AIDS, TB and Malaria (to give it its full name), DATA chose to work in cooperation with First World pharmaceutical companies, paying the full prices for their products, rather than directly challenging their medical patents, as Nelson Mandela, among others, had demanded and attempted. This meant that, for some years, those companies made substantial profits from the AIDS spending that poured into Africa. This sort of ‘constructive engagement’ with Big Pharma has been controversial, but activists have honest differences about it, many agreeing to cooperate with the companies. Over the years the relevant organisations have moved matters along gradually to the point where generic drugs from India are playing a substantial role in African AIDS treatment.

  Then there was something that would become a recurring theme: the fondness of Bono and his organisation for declaring victory, over the heads of other AIDS activists. Thus, for example, the $15 billion over five years announced in 2003 for Bush’s Pepfar was considered inadequate by most of the organisations that campaigned for such funding, but their disappointment was drowned out by a Bono-led chorus of praise. Again, there is a tactical argument that can be made in defence of Bono’s approach: that ‘victories’ are encouraging for activists and helpfully stroke the egos of politicians and officials. (The first Pepfar actually spent more than $15 billion, and considerably more money was won for the next five-year plan in 2008, after all.) But some campaigners feared that this sort of ‘pragmatism’, the embodiment of Bono’s briefcase-over-barricades line, had been elevated to a principle, at the expense of making enough noise about the fundamental rights of all people to decent, free healthcare, and the incapacity or unwillingness of the West to address those rights.

  Finally, there are the most profound philosophical questions about how the West is constructed by this sort of activism as the dispenser of all that is good. Africa, rather than being a real and varied place, is transformed into a project for Western conscience, a sort of vocation – with or without religious connotations. A wealth of powerful insights, some by African scholars, have mercilessly criticised the political and value structures in which Bono’s brand of celebrity humanitarianism is situated, on AIDS and other matters. In their view, it is not excessive to label Bono’s activity ‘cognitive imperialism’, which ‘constructs Africa as an eternal lack, and narrates its future as westerners’ good deed to be done’.66

  Zambian free-market, anti-aid economist Dambisa Moyo has sparked the ire of Bono’s campaign group by writing that the ‘pop-culture of aid’, firmly located within the entertainment industry, has strengthened the popular misconception that aid is the solution to African poverty.67 Other scholars, who may not share Moyo’s general outlook, are nonetheless harsh on over-simplified campaigns that ignore the obvious – namely, decades of historical failures of aid as a spur to really significant development in Africa, where hundreds of millions of people remain desperately poor.

  Researcher Audrey Bryan, who has examined how Bono and Geldof are portrayed in Irish schoolbooks, draws conclusions that are valid well beyond the texts she studies:

  While ostensibly about the lives of those whom they seek to uplift and save, discourses of high profile Western benevolence, concern an
d compassion actively position ‘our guys’ as the stars of the development show, while the objects of national (and Northern) benevolence merely function as the backdrop to a story which is really about ‘us.’ In other words, the trope of celebrity humanitarian functions as a redemption fantasy … wherein inhabitants of the Global South are discursively positioned as the backdrop against which ‘global good guys’ can enhance their sense of themselves, and the reputation of the nation they represent, with insufficient attention to their own participation in relations of domination.68

  These dissenting voices may be varied, but they are not isolated, at least in the low-profile realm of scholarship. In 2008 the Journal of Pan African Studies devoted almost an entire issue to highly critical research concerning Bono’s ‘(Product) RED’ campaign. (See pp. 87–101.)

  Finnish scholar Riina Yrjölä has written some of the most densely powerful critiques of how the words of Bono and Geldof ‘elaborate a colonial imaginary’ about Africa: ‘these discourses not only serve a purpose in the maintenance of hegemonic Western activity in Africa, but are also instrumental in constructing consensus for the existing world order, where the global South is, and remains, in a subordinate position to the West’.69

  Bono constructs ‘moral geographies and world views’.70 At a ‘national prayer breakfast’ in Washington, for example, he said: ‘I truly believe that when the history books will be written, our age will be remembered for three things: the war on terror, the digital revolution and what we did – or did not do – to put the fire out in Africa. History, like God, is watching what we do.’71 ‘We’, the embodiment of ‘our age’, are assumed to be Western actors. In another interview he said that, just as the post-war Marshall Plan had defended Europe against ‘Sovietism’ in the Cold War, aiding Africa would help combat Islamism, creating ‘a bulwark against the extremism of our age in what I call the Hot War. This makes sense, not just as a moral imperative, but as a political and a strategic one.’72