The Frontman
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A transnational class of elites, experts and technocrats in largely unaccountable state institutions and completely unaccountable corporations and foundations continues to lead the way in this project. Celebrity humanitarians have become instrumental to their work. Bono may not have realised it when he climbed aboard a largely admirable campaign against developing-world debt in the late 1990s, but his reputation for integrity and the love for his music felt by millions of people would become important weapons in the arsenal of those seeking to maintain and extend their influence, power and profit in a changing world. He fronted for the G8; he fronted for Tony Blair and Gordon Brown and George Bush; he fronted for Nike and Apple and Motorola; he fronted for Bill Clinton and Bill Gates and the Irish Financial Services Centre to boot.
Whether he believed in his heart that it was worthwhile to advance the plans and interests of such people and organisations in order to achieve larger benign goals is a moot question. He should be judged not on his motivations or intentions, which are invisible, but on the plain reality of his actions. Bono cannot be expected to support every righteous cause, but it is striking to note some he has not. For example, right on his doorstep in Ireland, there are the campaigners in County Mayo in the west of the country who are fighting to keep a dangerous Shell gas pipeline and refinery out of their community, and making powerful links with Ogoni people in Nigeria who have waged similar struggles against the petroleum giant. The Irish locals in this boggy, remote landscape sometimes call themselves ‘the Bog-oni’, and they have invited Nigerians and others from around the world to come share their experiences; they have fought in the courts and lain down in front of trucks; they have sailed their fishing boats in front of giant pipe-laying vessels; they have been beaten off the roads by police and security men and been locked up in jail for months at a time; they have drawn attention to the political cowardice and corruption that saw Ireland sell off the rights to its offshore gas and oil to foreign companies at a rate so low it would make a Third World dictator laugh all the way to his Swiss bank.127 And they have done all this fighting without an ounce of support from the Irishman who claims to be a campaigner for justice and global solidarity.
Then there are those Africans who have been fortunate or unfortunate enough to have actually left Africa, and thus lost Bono’s support. Tens of thousands of African migrants live in Ireland, many thousands as asylum-seekers forced into an inhumane system called ‘direct provision’. Under this system, some 2,000 asylum-seeker children and 4,000 adults live packed into hostels, denied the right to work and given a pittance of €19 per week each (less for the kids) as an allowance.128 For many years one such hostel, Kilmarnock House, housing 100 or more residents and owned by a controversial Protestant pastor, was located in Bono’s home village of Killiney – perhaps he could even see it, a mile or so away, from his hillside mansion. It wasn’t one of the better hostels: residents said conditions there were ‘prison-like’, and indeed at one point it was closed temporarily on health-and-safety grounds.129 A grim 2004 ‘needs assessment’ of its residents said that ‘due to the extremely limited availability of funding, most of the recommendations are constrained to activities that could be implemented by the community and voluntary sectors’.130 A number of people and organisations in Ireland campaign visibly for migrant rights, but Bono is not one of them. Chinedu Onyejelem, a Nigerian-born community activist who edits a ‘multicultural’ newspaper in Ireland and is usually adept at securing support from the great and good, was emphatic when asked if Bono had been of help to Ireland’s Africans: ‘The answer is NO. I tried several times to contact him and to get him to do something with us, but never got beyond his agent.’131
Perhaps contact with real grassroots activism of this sort would interfere with Bono’s rhetorically crucial claims to ‘represent’ the world’s poor. He periodically laughs at the cheekiness of his unelected representation, and recently even wished for the day when it would no longer be necessary, and he could ‘fuck off’.132 However, Bono has nonetheless not been shy of making the claim: ‘I’m representing the poorest and most vulnerable people. On a spiritual level, I have that with me. I’m throwing a punch, and the fist belongs to people who can’t be in the room, whose rage, whose anger, whose hurt I represent.’133 Richard Dienst has dismantled this claim with brilliant and bitter precision:
He does not claim to represent their interests, their perspectives, or even their hopes, but rather their ‘rage, anger, and hurt’: That is to say, he does not represent human beings, he represents affects, detached from real lives and filtered through his celebrity image … It is not as if ‘the poorest and most vulnerable people’ do not express themselves, in countless ways, all the time. They are articulate, deliberate, and far too various to be summed up just by their pain or their poverty. They have many representatives, too, in and out of governments. All of them are aching to be heard. None of that seems to matter when Bono goes to the White House. Indeed, we should make no mistake about it: he can stand there precisely because those people are so absent; he can speak for them exactly insofar as they are silenced; he can ‘throw a punch’ at Bush, Blair, Obama, or any of the others only because he disguises the immense material force of their lives with the soft ‘moral force’ of his rhetoric … What is missing, invisible, off the agenda, is any belief that economic development can be a mode of collective self-determination, opening up a realm of freedom for the poor beyond that envisioned for them by billionaires.134
There can scarcely have been a more perfect expression of the way anything that might ever have been good or real about Bono has become corrupted, and of the relationship between the West and the global South he has come to ‘represent’, than what happened in the summer of 2012 on a popular African television programme. This was Big Brother Africa: Stargame, the seventh season of a pan-African version of the vicious and voyeuristic ‘reality’ show that puts a group of strangers into a fully televised house and pits them against each other around the clock, with a cash prize at stake; they must often appear to cooperate with each other in tasks in order for each to advance his or her strategy for success, achieved partly through public voting. The show is, as its title suggests, a depiction of a microcosm of the surveillance state portrayed in George Orwell’s famous novel Nineteen Eighty-Four; but it is also, intentionally or not, a metaphor for, and embodiment of, the savage world of deceit, betrayal, false appearances, ruthless competition and commercial exploitation of even the most humane relationships that characterise neoliberal capitalism; the African version adds implied competition between nations to this happy script. Needless to say, it was popular over its three full months in the forty-seven African countries that screened it, sixteen of which were represented among the ‘housemates’. Bono’s ONE Campaign had got itself involved with a gardening task on the show, as part of its ‘Thrive’ campaign on African agriculture. Housemates also had to design T-shirts for ‘Thrive’. Thrive-related tasks were ongoing when, on one July day, with most of the housemates bearing the ONE logo on their chests, there on the big screen from where Big Brother normally addressed the housemates appeared a Thrive logo, followed by a video of Bono. He was beamed in, on tape, straight from Dublin, speaking bland phrases of encouragement, Big Brother personified. The full Orwellian effect, whereby words mean the opposite of what they should really mean, was underlined by the giant ‘RESPECT’ flashing electronically beneath his visage. Obviously aware, albeit insufficiently, of the relationship implied by his appearance in this role, he blathered, to the accompanying fast-moving video graphics: ‘This is your Irish rock star fan, Bono. You are my big brothers and little sisters.’ He continued: ‘I hear that you’re growing and farming the future, and that the fruit is the hope and change that we’re all hungry for.’135
Here was Bono, back where he had started so modestly in Ethiopia twenty-seven years before, entertainingly telling Africans how to grow their food, but now coming through in rapid jump-cuts, dressed in full celebrit
y regalia, for a European TV-show franchise specifically designed to bring out, and display, the worst in people, and speaking – vaguely, but in the context of the visuals and the show, unquestionably – on behalf of an agricultural partnership that included Monsanto, in soundbites borrowed from Obama.
‘This is so surreal, I cannot believe it,’ a housemate said, in apparent awe. But you’d better believe it: it’s all too real.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The late, great Alexander Cockburn used to ask his interns and acolytes, ‘Is your hate pure?’ I wasn’t either of those things, exactly, but he asked me anyway. I doubted his seriousness, as I also doubted the purity of any aspect of my being. (Or of his, for that matter.) I couldn’t say Yes, and I hope it was just a long-running joke, because otherwise he might have been sorely disappointed with me and with this book, which is not animated by hatred, pure or otherwise, of its subject. Like all the work I’ve ever done as a journalist it was, however, animated by him, and it was my great good fortune that in the last decade he helped to bring that work to a wider audience.
Although I cannot repay Alexander, I hope I may find some way to thank his fine friend and co-editor at CounterPunch, Jeffrey St Clair, to whom this book owes its very existence, as well as its rocking short title. The magical CounterPunch chain of acquaintance also found me linked with another of my animating heroes, Dave Marsh, whose excellent writings on Bono have all-too-obviously been an inspiration for these pages, and whose conversations on- and offline always make me think deeper.
Beside Jeff and Dave, at the top of the list of people who might have done this book better is my extraordinary friend Andy Storey, who over the decades has freely shared with me his deep analytical expertise on Africa, economics, music, and even Bono. (His thoughts on football and films haven’t made the cut this time.) In countless sessions he made the Swan bar in Aungier Street my classroom, and he is directly responsible for a significant chunk of the bibliography and several crucial improvements in this text. The errors are of course all my own, but I would never have been smart enough to make them without him.
Margaret Kelleher was responsible in another way, offering her empty home and the company of her beautiful cat Shelley when a deadline threatened and a writing retreat was needed. The book’s back was broken under her print of a sixteenth-century map, ‘Africae Tabula Nova’, a welcome reminder of the long history of European efforts to inscribe meanings on that continent.
I am grateful to numerous librarians, in my home institution the Dublin Institute of Technology, in Trinity College Dublin and in the Dublin public library system, who made my research easier. Paddy Prendeville of Phoenix magazine was a guide to that fine and dangerous publication’s daunting print and digital archives, and was also one of the many, many people around Ireland who, either at my request or simply on hearing of my topic, launched fascinating, insightful, provocative conversations. Many of them will recognise their insights, and I hope they do not mind the borrowing. Most of them would probably prefer to go unnamed, but particular thanks must go to scholar Sean Dunne, who offered formidable ideas and a great graffiti sighting. Also special thanks to the vegetable-seller who mentioned the South Park episode about Bono!
A book that is not in my notes but which was nonetheless useful is Nathan Jackson’s Bono’s Politics: The Future of Celebrity Political Activism, self-published in 2008 and with its text available free at bonospolitics.com. Jackson might not relish the mention, since his views and conclusions are so different from my own, but his book is a clear, thorough presentation of what might be called the case for the defence.
At Verso, I am indebted to Andy Hsaio for showing the confidence to commission this from me, and to Audrea Lim for her extraordinarily valuable editorial input, which was friendly but challenging, thorough and thought-provoking. Similar thanks and praise are due to a wise and sympathetic copy-editor, Charles Peyton.
My brilliant eldest daughter Louisa was the first I heard enunciate clearly the Irish reaction to Bono’s tax controversy a few years back. ‘No one can stand him anyway – this just gives us a reason for how we already felt.’ Even allowing for exaggerated teenage certitude, the thoughts of her and her equally brilliant sister Cara have been enormously treasured, and their company too.
I think my youngest, Stella, has particularly enjoyed speaking the phrase, ‘so you can work on your Bono-book’. I look forward with pleasure to her next phrase, and my next excuse. Her mother, my wife Catherine Ann Cullen, has for more than ten years been the best of all possible companions, interlocutors, editors, exemplars. She is inspiring and strengthening, and a helluva lotta fun. I can scarcely conceive of this work, or anything else, without her.
NOTES
INTRODUCTION
1 Michka Assayas, Bono on Bono: Conversations with Michka Assayas (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2005), 17.
2 ‘Leadership at a Time of Transition and Turbulence – A Conversation with Peter Sutherland KCMG’, Gresham College, 8 March 2011, at gresham.ac.uk.
3 ‘Give Us the Money’, Why Poverty? (BBC Four, 25 November 2012).
4 Marina Hyde, ‘Bono: The Celebrity Who Just Keeps Giving’, Guardian, 23 September 2010; Jane Bussmann, ‘Kony2012 Made up for the Flaws of Bono, Geldof and Co’, Guardian, 3 April 2012.
5 Eamonn McCann, ‘Make Bono Pay Tax’, CounterPunch, 26 February 2009, at counterpunch.org.
6 ‘Give Us the Money’.
7 Daniel Schorn, ‘Bono And The Christian Right’, CBS News, 20 November 2005, at cbsnews.com.
8 Ibid.
9 George Monbiot, ‘Africa’s New Best Friends’, Guardian, 5 July 2005.
1 IRELAND
1 Shane Hegarty, ‘The Sad Ballad of Bruce and Bono’, Irish Times, 24 January 2009.
2 Michka Assayas, Bono on Bono: Conversations with Michka Assayas (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2005), 112.
3 Bill Flanagan, U2: At the End of the World (London: Random House, 1996), 78.
4 David Kootnikoff, U2: A Musical Biography (Oxford: Greenwood Press, 2010), 8.
5 Eamon Dunphy, Unforgettable Fire: The Story of U2 (London: Penguin, 1987), 22–31.
6 Bono, ‘Transcript: Bono Remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast’, USA Today, 2 February 2006.
7 Kootnikoff, U2: A Musical Biography, 3–6.
8 Michael Gray, The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia (London: Continuum, 2008), 689.
9 Dunphy, Unforgettable Fire, 26–8.
10 Dan Wooding, ‘Whatever Happened to U2?’, n.d., at prayforsurf.net.
11 Bono, The Edge, Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen Jr, U2 by U2 (London: HarperCollins, 2006), 135.
12 Bill Graham, U2: The Early Days (London: Mandarin Paperbacks, 1989), 24–5.
13 Ibid., 30–2.
14 Assayas, Bono on Bono, 94.
15 Bono et al., U2 By U2, 118.
16 Graham, U2: The Early Days, 30.
17 Ibid., 42.
18 Ibid., 37.
19 Sean Campbell and Gerry Smyth, Beautiful Day: Forty Years of Irish Rock (Cork: Atrium, 2005), 4.
20 Graham, U2: The Early Days, 33.
21 Ibid., 23.
22 Ibid., 10.
23 Dave Fanning, ‘U2 – Just Beginning’, Magill, June 1985.
24 Graham, U2: The Early Days, 36.
25 ‘U2 and the USA’, U2 Magazine, November 1983. This story of principled withdrawal is somewhat confused by a photograph of the band walking under umbrellas in the 1982 parade, taken by the well-known photographer Lynn Goldsmith and available online at morrisonhotelgallery.com.
26 Bill Graham, ‘Irish Ways … Irish Laws: The Moving Hearts Interview’, Hot Press, 24 October 1981.
27 Eamonn Sweeney, Down, Down Deeper and Down: Ireland in the 70s and 80s (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 2010), 231.
28 ‘Fitzgerald Launches Youth Committee’, Irish Times, 16 September 1983.
29 Laura Jackson, Bono: The Biography (London: Piatkus, 2003), 43.
30 Initially the British claimed that they wer
e returning fire in Derry, and a first official inquiry whitewashed the slaughter; a long peace-process-inspired British investigation confirmed in 2010 what everyone in Ireland had already known for decades: that the victims were completely innocent.
31 Bono et al., U2 by U2, 135.
32 Brian Trench, ‘See the Conquering Heroes Come’, Magill, June 1987; Bill Rolston, ‘ “This is Not a Rebel Song”: The Irish Conflict and Popular Music’, Race and Class 42(3) (2001): 49–67; Barbara Bradby and Brian Torode, ‘To Whom Do U2 Appeal?’, The Crane Bag 8: 2 (1984): 73–8.
33 Kootnikoff, U2: A Musical Biography, 22. The extent to which the specifics of Bloody Sunday in Derry had become a forgotten embarrassment to the southern Irish establishment by the 1980s can be measured by the fact that respected journalist Eamon Dunphy’s U2 ‘biography’, published in 1987, got the year of the atrocity wrong, and mentioned sniffily that ‘many’ of the day’s victims had been innocent. The errors were not corrected in the 1993 edition.
34 ‘A Social History of U2: 1976-2005’, The Dubliner, April 2007.
35 ‘Band FAQ’, U2FAQS.COM: Frequently Asked Questions About U2, n.d., at u2faqs.com.
36 Bono et al., U2 by U2, 130.
37 Phil Joanou, U2: Rattle and Hum, DVD (Paramount, 1999).
38 Bono et al., U2 by U2, 130.
39 Bono, ‘In Ireland, Tuesday’s Grace’, New York Times, 19 June 2010.
40 Isaac Guzman, ‘No Bombast, But U2 Bands Together With N.Y.’, New York Daily News, 26 October 2001.
41 Sweeney, Down, Down Deeper and Down, 353.
42 Jim Carroll, ‘Self Aid, 22 Years On’, Irish Times, 19 May 2008.