Bono Read online

  We have all heard that dreadful phrase: “You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.”

  I know. In the end, ideas are not worth as much as people. Whenever you meet a philosophy where that is not true, and where ideas are worth more than people, you have to be on your guard. A dangerous idea that almost makes sense is a very compelling thing. In a way, when the devil gets it right, it’s usually not a wrong fighting with a right, it’s usually two half-truths fighting it out. It’ll do the most damage. Marxism-Leninism was an extraordinary idea to lead mankind out of its squalor. It was a dangerous idea that almost made sense. There are many.

  Just after we ended our last conversation, I remember you told me you had recently met Senator Jesse Helms to discuss the AIDS in Africa issue. You came out of the meeting with a lot of respect for him. You mentioned that it was a disturbing experience for you, since as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in the early eighties, he had done whatever he could to suppress the Sandinistas.

  Well, you know. Wandering around Nicaragua, seeing their supermarkets empty—nothing on the shelves—seeing their people starving because of the blockade the United States had put on it, seeing the lives lost, as these people tried to escape from the tyranny of the landowners. One percent of landowners owned more than forty percent of the land before the revolution. I remember one very moving Mass they gave out to the people. At the end of the Mass, the priest then picked up a list of the dead. And he called each one of them by name: “Rodrigo Omares!” and all the congregation went: “Presente!” [making it sound like a sort of smothered roar] “Maria Gonzalez!—Presente!” And they were calling out a roll of the dead and the congregation replied: “Presente!”—they’re present with us. You could see in the eyes of all around me. I could see the cost. This was the other side of America as far as I was concerned at that time: America, the neighborhood bully. And one of the architects on the Right at that time was Senator Jesse Helms, who later did me and everyone working on the Global AIDS Emergency a great favor when he came out in our support. It was a great irony for me, to find myself twenty years later feeling such affection for this old Cold Warrior.

  Did you mention what you thought about the past when you spoke to him?

  I never brought it up. I took my time with him to press ahead with our work in the AIDS emergency. He did an incredible thing: he publicly repented for the way he had thought about HIV / AIDS. Politicians rarely do that. He really changed the way people on the Right thought about this disease. People said to me: this is the devil himself you’re going to meet, and his politics are just right of Attila the Hun. He had personally dismantled the National Endowment for the Arts in America. Todd Rundgren had written a song about him: “Fuck You, Jesse Helms.” But I found him to be a beautiful man with convictions that I wouldn’t all agree with, but had to accept that he believed in them passionately. This is happening to me a lot. I am discovering how much respect I have for people who stay true to their convictions, no matter how unpopular.

  OK, now imagine we’re trying to write a script about your adventures in Central America. Now, the credits have rolled and the camera pans over a bird’s-eye view of a landscape with forests and hills. What scene would come next?

  So . . . Walking in the hills, about a hundred miles from the main city of Salvador.

  First, what are you doing there?

  I’m walking with a friend who has a group called “Sanctuary” that smuggles people whose lives are in danger, out from enemy territory, and brings them to America as kind of refugees. And he has a few programs to help with the poor in El Salvador, and I—myself and Ali—are both involved in one of those programs, working with the campesinos, the peasant farmers. So, we’re going to see the project, but it is in rebel-controlled areas.

  Who are you walking with? And what do they look like?

  Well, there’s an American fellow. His name is Dave Bedstone, he’s a sort of a Harrison Ford in Raiders of the Lost Ark character: adventurer, intellectually and spiritually, and indeed in rough physical terrain. And there’s his girlfriend, Wendy, who is from San Francisco: curly hair, keeping everyone’s spirits up. And then there’s Howard Jules Hoyle, who has driven from San Francisco to El Salvador with a surfboard on his roof. It is “Surf’s up, Captain”—if you’ve seen Apocalypse Now, the character of Robert Duvall. He likes to surf. He’s very funny, there’s comedy in every piece of his body language. Ali, who keeps looking at me with those eyes that say, “Why exactly are we here again?” [laughs]

  So what project brought you there?

  It’s a small farm, a co-operative, and I’m just helping out with that financially. Then there’s a local guide. It’s extraordinary, because as I was walking through this sort of thick green rainforesty terrain, some of the rebels pass us on the road. They’re like fifteen-year-old girls, beautiful girls, carrying rifles, and you dare not look at them with anything other than respect. [laughs] Then we pass a wall on which is written: FUCK JESUS. So I’m a little taken aback and I go: “Wow! I thought this was the home of liberation theology. What’s going on here?” To which our guide replied: “No, no, that’s not Jesus Christ. It’s Hay-zoos, he lives around here. No one likes him. He’s working for the other side.” [laughs] So we continue on along this path, and as we’re crossing a road, we see some government troops. They look a little worried, and just as we cross the road, there’s a dead sort of pop-pop-pop, a sort of dull—couldn’t be further from the sound of gunfire in the movies—type sound, because it’s so flat, and it whips over our heads. And we just freeze on the road. We don’t know what’s gonna happen, whether we should take for cover or we should stand still. There’s silence, big silence . . . We can hear each other’s hearts beating, then laughing from the government troops who were just letting us know that they don’t like us and they could take our life if they really wanted to.

  So what kind of drama have we got here?

  What’s the soundtrack? Any music?

  It would have been a comedy at times. If you saw us stop and freeze, there was a freeze-frame in a black comedy: “Rock star craps in his pants.” [laughs]No, cold silence. Maybe the sound of five hearts put through an amplifier.

  Were your lives really in danger?

  To tell you how real a possibility that was, the day before, we were driving along the motorway from the airport and we saw a body thrown out of a van on the road. People go missing round here all the time, and some nuns have lost their lives recently. I mean it was a very dangerous time, and in truth, we didn’t need to be there. If I’m honest, I was at that time thinking seriously that maybe we should have stayed in the Sunset Marquis at Los Angeles and gone to the beach. [laughs] There was no heroism present at this point, just: “Oh shit . . . Why have I brought Ali here?” But, you know, they passed on. And my friend, who now lectures in a university in Oakland, California, is just blank-faced and fearless: “They’re just trying to scare us. Keep walking. Not a problem.” Not a problem? I thought. What’s a problem? Grenades? Anyway, we walked on to the project, feeling like Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now, the firebombing of the villages shaking the ground underneath our feet. This sounds like gross irresponsibility, but my friend had to get money to these beleaguered farmers. There was a kind of ethnic cleansing with a government health warning. They would tell people: “Get out of your villages, we’re about to bomb the shit out of you.” Military sponsored by the Land of the Free, terrorizing peasant farmers. It was unbelievable. Because people wouldn’t have left their villages; they were their homes. It was carnage, it was awful. It was the other side of America. It’s a long time ago now, but in order to remember it, I tried to turn it into music, in the song “Bullet the Blue Sky.”

  Does that song fully represent the complexity of the experience?

  No, but I tried.

  So you are the gringo there. Politically engaged rock singer visiting a dangerous place, and meddling, I would suggest.

  A tourist, you
could unkindly suggest.

  [laughs] I was about to say that! Well, you were a political tourist. Have you heard of this outstanding book by Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel? Its subtitle is “A Short History of Everybody for the Last 30,000 Years.”

  It’s an anthropological book, yeah. I have the book, and I’ve started to read it. Story of my life!

  In his foreword, he is trying to describe why he wanted to write the book. He says he had a revelation walking on a beach in New Guinea with some local politician. Diamond is a white man, his companion was a black man. They discuss their two countries’ history and fate, and the man says to him: “Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?” Diamond says he actually wrote the book in order to answer that question, actually taking up his point of view. That, I found fascinating. So did you try to consider the point of view these people in Central America had of you? Were you interested in what they had to say to you? Like: What is your purpose here? Why do you want to help us?

  Right, but you did not go over there as a journalist.

  I was just looking for some value for money, you know. [laughs] This is something I had gotten interested in. It’s intellectual curiosity. I’m a writer. Any writer, if he’s any good, is a journalist. And I wanna see things for myself, not through mediation of newspapers and TV. You can sit in the air-conditioning, behind a plate glass of your prosperity, or you can try to smash it and get out. I wanna see things for myself, I don’t like to see things secondhand.

  So you’re claiming to be a reporter.

  I’m just curious. You go around lifting stones until you find some really interesting creepy crawlies.

  Sure, but from my experience as a traditional reporter, there is a point when you’re talking to people, and they start asking you about your life. It’s always: “Are you married? Do you have any children? How is life there? What’s the price of things?” They ask you about football, about movie stars, often about the most superficial things in your culture. Did you have that experience with people from El Salvador, or was it completely different?

  Of course, exactly that. You know, I’ve had extraordinary experiences that are two-way. I can’t recall the details—too many details—of the lives that I met on that trip: looks, faces, the resolve and the humor. I remember things like that. But I wasn’t going there to discover what was going on particularly in Salvador, if I’m honest. My subject wasn’t El Salvador, my subject was America.

  How do you mean?

  I wanted to know what was the on-the-ground effect of American foreign policy, because I was a fan of America. And I believed in this country, more than most people I knew, and I was lost to its music and its literature. But I wanted to know: what did it mean? I went there with an open mind. It’s funny, I talked to Sean Penn about this, ’cause he did the same when he went to Baghdad. He’s been a couple of times. People say: that is not a place for a movie star, Baghdad. And he said, “I want to know what this is.” And on his second trip, he was conciliatory, because he saw there had been progress made. As to the occupation, he didn’t agree with it, but he could see that a lot of lives had been changed for the better, if not enough lives. He said that. So, writers are reporters, and we wanna see things for ourselves. Dissent is a very valuable part of the American psychology. I really respect him for that. Anyway, I’m just explaining. If I wanted to really understand the people of Salvador and some of the people whom I was trying to help, I would have stayed there for a lot longer than a week. I was taking snapshots.

  So let’s keep on going with the screenplay. We had an establishing shot, which was this little group of yours walking on that path in the hills. What would be an important line of a dialogue between you and someone from there, one of the campesinos? Was there a character that struck you? A discussion you had there that was particularly meaningful to you?

  If there was any line of dialogue, I’d have to put it in a more Monty Python kind, and adopt a John Cleese accent, and say [mock Eton accent]: “Hello-o! So you are a revolutionary, are you? Jolly good. I’m a rock sta-ar.” [laughs] “Lovely to meet you. What is it exactly that you do? You shoot at people. I see. Now, just explain what exactly has the level of oppression been over the last years. Hmmm, considerable, I can see that. So, how many families run the country again? I get it. Anyone here ever heard of Gandhi? Oh, sorry about that, sorry. No, no, not a moment to bring up nonviolence. Well, there we go.” I mean: a sort of twenty-four-, twenty-five-year-old late developer trying to figure out a worldview: are there any circumstances where an armed struggle is correct, to challenge my convictions about nonviolence, and try to figure out: why are the good guys on the side of the bad guys?

  So why were the good guys on the side of the bad guys? What did you learn about that?

  Communism did not produce freedom or prosperity for anybody. It has produced a hundred years of some of the most heinous crimes ever committed by human beings on one another. So I can understand now why America had such a fear of it in Central America. But the kind of socialism that I was interested in was not of that old Marxist-Leninist order. It was a new shoot of it, which, as I say, did not attempt to put down people’s faith, and used the religion of the people to inform them about their rights. And I think that was one of the most important moments of the twentieth century: the birth of that new expression of equality. I know it went sour, but I thought it was a shame that the religious establishment didn’t embrace it and try to foster some of the ideas. You know, there was Archbishop Romero, who was shot, and the Pope at the time wouldn’t acknowledge him. There were a lot of people who put an awful lot on the line for these ideas: “the Gospel of the poor,” they called it. And these people, as far as I was concerned, lived their religion. They were priests who would rather be with the people than with their peers or their superiors. You know, there is an amazing moment, and it’s one of those passages of Scriptures, which I have to tell you about, because it’s pertinent here. It’s when the Children of Israel are wandering through the desert. They’ve just been delivered from captivity by Moses, but they’re straight back to worshipping the Golden Calf. It’s business as usual, they have forgotten the God who delivered them. They keep getting warnings, and finally God just has enough and says to Moses: “Get out of the way, I’m gonna destroy my people. Then I’m gonna start again. This experiment has just run out of gas, and this freedom thing is really not working out. [laughs] So get away from the midst of these people, because I’m gonna vaporize them. I can, I made them, after all.” Of course, Michka, you’ll realize I’m paraphrasing here. And then the Scriptures record that “Moses, knowing the heart of God”—this is an amazing line—“instead of running away, runs into the center of the people and says: ‘If you take them, take me.’ ” And God presumably smiles. It was the Gospels in action, people laying down their life for their brother. You know, it’s a great line from the Holy Book—sorry to get all religious on your ass this morning: “No greater love has a man than he lays his life down for his brother.” This is what I was seeing in Central America.

  But before that expedition in El Salvador, you visited Nicaragua. The revolutionaries were in power over there. What impression did that make on you?

  I was at the time very inspired by the revolution. Maybe I was suckered by the really nice treatment of the people I met in government, the poets and musicians that I met there. At the same time, though, I do remember on Revolution Day listening to [sighs] Daniel Ortega speak for about four hours. With the translator beside me, I’m going: Whoa! What is it about these revolutionaries? They talk longer than I do and I can talk. I don’t do paragraphs—but these guys don’t do chapters.

  Fidel Castro’s speeches are marathons, actually.

  I know. These guys are the Grateful Dead of political speech-making. They go on and on, and they don’t take acid.

  It’s more like hypnosis, actually.

 
I could see some of the bullshit that was coming out of it. I talked with Salman Rushdie about that, actually, at some point. Because it turns out that he was at the same Revolution Day speech as I. We were wandering around each other. We didn’t know each other at that point. He wrote The Jaguar Smile out of that—that was his comment.

  And what was your comment on the Sandinistas and Central America?

  I wrote a couple of tunes that I’m very proud of to this day. And one of them, “Mothers of the Disappeared,” has been played all over Central and South America, as an act of defiance in Chile. These women who had their children abducted and murdered by the secret police didn’t even know where they had been buried. They had no place, no graveyard to mourn. These women, these mothers, their stories, I will remember, always. You know, I’ve learnt so much on these sorties, these outings. As I say, I was born in the suburbs. What did I know about the world? I was always bored with my own. [sighs] Even where I grew up, I was always sleeping on somebody else’s floor. I just have that wanderlust. That’s who I am. So I don’t know. It’s not even about learning—at a certain point, that’s my excuse for going there—or end results like writing some songs, writing some articles. It’s probably something much more selfish. I like to describe it as intellectual curiosity, but maybe it’s just tourism or voyeurism, I don’t know. It is who I am. I’ve greedy eyes.

  My French publisher once told me he felt strangely about people like you, who travel around the world to do charity work. Because, he elaborated, the reason why they do that is that they’re too bored to stay in one place for more than a week. Obviously, what they do is useful work, there is no denying it. But he thought that the main reason that motivates them is the fact that they can’t bear returning home every evening to their wife and children. Or to any other boring daily reality.